I like to lead a touch of itinerant life, never really going for a career path. I get involved in many kinds of work and they all stick to me, nothing really is lost. So I end up doing many kinds of tasks and as luck would have it, visit many lands as well.

I have travelled wearing many hats and to very different places and have collected memories and some livelihood coins as well. Best to say I have survived despite my slightly unorthodox lifestyle. It has been fun and now that I am approaching my mid 70s and I don't plan to travel anymore, once in a while I share my experiences of fun, learning, and sometimes poignant observations.

Africa

I was doing a very cushy job with the UN in 1993 but I got restless and left. However, my relations with them like others were good. I did free- lance consultancies and also returned to journalism. Soon I had joined the BBC (1994) and then after covering politics for a year I got tired of politicians and their non-truths and decided to take a break. Just as I was contemplating resignation I got an offer from the UN to do an assignment in Africa and I didn't hesitate.

I resigned from the BBC sitting in the BBC office in Delhi and soon had taken a plane to Nigeria, a land I had not been to before though I had worked in Africa before. It was a tough assignment in terms of challenges but the people were wonderful and the work objective positive.

I did maintain my BBC contacts and they were very useful. I remember calling the London BBC service and asking my producer Manoshi Baruadi to inform my family in Dhaka that I was alive. I could not call them because the telephone people in a remote part of Africa didn't know where Bangladesh was and so couldn't figure out the exact charge for calling so refused to connect.

What I remember most about Africa is the lack of the State organizations and structures as well the isolated social structure. African colonialism was also far more brutal because Nigeria was pastoral and mercantile economic structures were missing. It was a string of tribal societies which were surviving but hadn't flourished, unable to cope with emerging economic demands. That was the past but now they are coping and doing very well.

Returning to Dhaka after finishing the assignment I pondered my new future. I started to do various media assignments including for the BBC. Political heat was high in 1996 so free- lance work was available. My BBC reputation was intact so I was not an unknown element. And suddenly on the basis of that I got an offer.

A group of Bangladeshis youth who had gone to Russia as students but as it crumbled went into various businesses and did very well. They wanted me to do media stories on them. No pay but full hospitality in Moscow. My pocket was not light then as I had been paid well in Africa. So I took the bait. An opportunity to see Russia first hand as it wallowed in post-socialist uncertainty was too tempting to give up. Thus, I sighed and signed and was on the way to Moscow on an Aeroflot flight watching guests in the upgraded class drink vodka with the enthusiasm babies suck mother's milk.

Russia up close

I was only in Moscow and that too just for a week but what I saw was what happens when the State system sustains all and when that crumbles so does everything and everyone depending on it. When I landed in Moscow nothing seemed really off and the non "authoritarian" treatment at the airport with quick and polite service was pleasant. In a trice I was out of the migration and customs and welcomed by a young Bangladeshi who was my airport pick up.

Very soon it was obvious that the Soviet Union had collapsed though Russia remained. My friend's wife was from one of the republics Russia had "liberated" and they with a child lived in a tiny apartment. What was interesting was to learn that all Bangladeshis were banned from visiting that republic the wife came from and so no "jamai-ador" for him. After the morning hospitality was done I was taken to the Friendship Hotel, a bland place with a bland staff who lacked professional interest in the guests was obvious and reeked of the past. And my sojourn began.

.....and shocked

I will share two incidents which illustrated the crumpling. I was once shown a huge block of flats where mostly academics, scientists and people of such ilk lived. What I noticed was a pile of boxes, some containing food, some clothes and other items. I was told that most of the people earned a salary that was pre Gorbachev era level and it was impossible to live on that. So students of the past and present would leave these food aid boxes for their gurus so that they would survive.

I thought it seemed a bit exaggerated except when even in the March chill a Bangladeshi friend refused to enter the Moscow underground where it was much warmer because one of his teacher's wife was begging that I began to understand. it shook me to the core.

I thought I had seen the worst but I also took a ride through a certain street in the city in a SUV where if you slowed down the vehicle, young girls would come forward, rain, hail snow and expose themselves as a display to the passengers just as people inspect goods before buying. I have seen poverty driven sex work all over the world but this was the glorious Soviet Union only half a decade back. Things had changed like hell.

And I saw wealth as well, the fabulous displays of clothes, goods and the rest at various points in Moscow. Closer at hand, the driver of the car I was in, dryly informed me that his son had several drivers like him. Talk about irony.

The Soviet Union was all state, nothing but the state structure and once it went and they do rather surprisingly, held together by a non-sustainable system, people suffer at a level rarely seen. Begging, prostitution, big and petty crime, looting state property are all part of the scene and oh so common all over the world. If the tribal system failed Africa in the later days, the state system had too in Russia. Perhaps neither is the final word on what works for a long time.