সিনেমা থেইকা পালায়া ১০৩.৩

আগুন ছড়ায়। বেশি ছড়ায় আগুনের ভিডিও। 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/ভিডিও থেইকা না। তার তেজ ও চিহ্নের লাইভ স্ট্রিম চলে এই শহরে।

§ Revisited

I wrote it on 29 March 2019, the morning after the FR Tower fire in Banani. At least twenty-five people died. Some were trapped at windows. Some fell while phones recorded and circulated the scene. Five weeks earlier, the Chawkbazar fire had killed seventy-one people. Dhaka seemed to be burning on a loop. Much of that burning reached me as an audiovisual product.

On the same day, Abdullah Mohammad Saad’s Live from Dhaka opened at Star Cineplex in Dhaka. I caught the black-and-white trailer in the feed, a man desperate to leave the city, a stylized fiction about escape. The same feed ran a colorful live stream, real people trying to leave a burning tower. Trailer and tragedy converged on one scrolling thumb. The fire played like the film’s promotion.

In 2026, I imagine the title as a radio frequency. Escaped from Cinema, 103.3 FM. Changing the channel offers no exit. Every frequency carries the same narrative, city following fire, camera following cry.

I still recall the most uncomfortable image, the falling body and its shadow. The camera, and yes, the camera person, does more than record violence. It can turn a fatal drop into a balanced geometry. Even in the presence of death, a mind schooled in the cinematic gaze cannot stop composing. I kept that recognition in the text. It does not settle which politics the documentation serves.

I used gili, the verb for swallowing, to name the algorithm-biased normalization of violence. Fear repeats as rhyme. The audiovisual format and social media platform mechanics work as a duo. They rank, rhyme, and repeat, reducing a tragedy to another reel, a routine scroll, a short-lived viral.

I split unnoyon (development) through a homophonic split: un and noyon. Developmentalism manifests as an enforced upward gaze: toward the Bangabandhu-1 satellite or elevated metro rail. And I saw obonoyon: a downward gaze toward that very falling body, and the infrastructure beneath the spectacle. The state commands you to look up while the street collapses below. Yes, I was mapping a regime’s rhetoric through visual directionality. But through such linguistic subversion, wasn’t I “weaponizing” the “shooting” language again? Was I escaping cinema’s visuality, or repeating it in another medium? Leaving the authority of the cinematic gaze was, and is, a struggle.

The government offered Bangabandhu-1, the country’s first satellite, launched in 2018, as a flagship achievement from a “developing” country. In the poem I cast it as a guest villain. Technological triumph plays a loud cameo, apologies to Sanjay Dutt, beside ordinary civic failure. The water vehicle stalled in traffic is the same logic in miniature, response made visible and still inadequate.

The expression n+1 reduces death to one added integer. This choice of notation carries a trace of my early academic training in mathematics, a reflex I could not resist. The state flattens agony into numbers to keep the myth of progress intact. A survivor becomes a typecast victim with a circulating digital story. Those who do not survive become anonymous bodies increasing the toll.

Feed-e mohamari was a metaphor for fear multiplying through the feed. Fear reproduced through continuous viewing. About a year later, the biological pandemic gave the phrase an unintended second meaning. It was an observation of a contagion already there. Disaster spreads as an ephemeral image. It colonizes attention.

Escaping the cinema format was the easy part. What would not leave was cinematic seeing, the habit of turning a real event into a reel. The city became its own screen. Social media platforms carried each disaster into the next sequence. The physical fire ended. The visual frames kept returning. I stay with that failure of escape. I stay with the live stream of structural negligence.