সিনেমা থেইকা পালায়া ১০৩.৩

আগুন ছড়ায়। বেশি ছড়ায় আগুনের ভিডিও। দেখি লাইভ ফ্রম ঢাকা। যেন তার প্রাক-রিলিজ প্রচারণা। বাঁচার জন্য মরতে লাফ দেয় এক কায়া। কম্পোজিশন-সঙ্গী তার ছায়া। ক্যামেরা সারি সারি, অদূরে পানিগাড়ি, আবহে আহাজারি, ফিডে মহামারি। গিলি ভয়ের অন্তমিল। গিলি অবনয়নের অ্যালগরিদম। বাঁচলে ভিকটিম, মরলে n+1। উন্নয়ন+স্যাটেলাইট এখানে অতিথি ভিলেন — সঞ্জয় দত্ত। দৃশ্যত সিনেমা থেইকা পালানো সোজা, আগুন থেইকা না। তার তেজ ও চিহ্নের লাইভ স্ট্রিম চলে এই শহরে।

§ Revisited^[1]

Reading this in 2026, the title echoes as a trapped radio frequency. Escape from Cinema, 103.3 FM. Changing the channel offers no silence. Every frequency carries the same narrative. City following fire. Soundscape following cry.

I wrote this on 29 March 2019, the morning after the FR Tower fire in Banani, Dhaka. At least twenty-five people died, some trapped at windows, others falling. The building had no fire safety clearance. Its emergency exits were locked. Five weeks earlier, the Chawkbazar fire killed seventy-one people. The Fire Service recorded over 24,000 fires across Bangladesh that year. Dhaka burned on a loop, reaching me as disposable audiovisual content.

On the same day, Abdullah Mohammad Saad’s Live from Dhaka opened at Star Cineplex. My Facebook feed carried the black-and-white trailer: a man escaping the city. Next to it, color clips of real people fleeing a burning tower. The real footage was itself live, from Dhaka. The sequence turned fire footage into a promotional prelude, justifying the film’s title.

The image that hooked me was the falling body and its shadow. I found kinetic geometry within the catastrophe. I was more voyeur than filmmaker. The poem kept that recognition as a confession. I could not stop composing, no matter the politics the documentation served.

The verb gili (“I swallow”) captured my own passivity. The platform ranked, rhymed, and compressed human suffering into a routine scroll. Fear repeated as algorithmic rhythm. Tragedy became a digital commodity. The scroll absorbed the anger. The words were a safe no-budget attempt to escape that consumption. I am not sure the poem left what it described.

I mapped the regime’s rhetoric through a homophonic cut of unnoyon (development), splitting it into un noyon (upward gaze). The government demanded citizens look up. Elevated metro rail. Bangabandhu-1 satellite, marketed as a nationalist triumph of “Digital Bangladesh.” Against this I forced an obonoyon, a downward look toward the collapsing infrastructure beneath the spectacle. The satellite acts as the guest villain (apologies to Sanjay Dutt). The government projected space-age sovereignty while its fire response failed at street level. But in reversing the direction of looking, I was still composing. Leaving that authority was, and is, an unfinished struggle.

The notation n+1 reduces another death to one added integer, a reflex of my early training in mathematics I could not resist. The government flattens agony into bureaucratic arithmetic to keep its progress myth intact. The platform converts survivors into typecast victims and the dead into anonymous counters of views and shares. Both systems strip the person from the record.

Feed-e mohamari (epidemic in the feed) was a metaphor for fear multiplying through the interface. The phrase caught a pattern already present. About a year later, the pandemic gave the phrase an unintended second meaning.

Escaping cinema as institution was the easy part. The composing stayed. The consumption stayed. The fire ended. The feed moved on. The frame kept returning. I stay with that failure of escape.