Old Dhaka

Butcher carries a multiple number of meanings. In this post, when I say butcher I mean someone who slaughters and dresses animals and sells them. This profession is a very common one, not only in Bangladesh, but also throughout the world. Why then, am I making this post in my blog which talks mostly about professions more-or-less specific to Old Dhaka?

That is because it is one of the oldest professions of Old Dhaka and this type of butchers slaughter and dress only chickens for a living. While walking through the marketplace in Old Dhaka, one is bound to stop for a minute to watch these butchers smoothly work on the chickens. They are such experts that you will be amazed to see the perfection with which they dress the chickens and hang them for sale.

Hardly any of the butchers that you talk to have chosen this profession for themselves. Most of them had their fathers and grandfathers in the same profession.And from a very young age they knew that this was going to be their earning source.

Immensely interesting is the fact that in other parts of Dhaka city, the butchers have a very low income. In Old Dhaka however, these butchers are better off than the people of many other professions there. Of course, they are not rich and their income is not something that they can spend without thinking. But it is enough to run their family and to send their children to school. This very old profession of the Old Dhaka is a very demanding profession and so the helplessness of not being able to provide for the family is not something the butchers go to bed thinking about at night.

There was a time when television repairing and radio repairing were a common phenomenon in the lives of the common people. So the demand for people who repaired these items was very high. Not every household had a television or a radio. Only the rich people could afford a television and needless to say, a large number of the rich population lived in Old Dhaka. So, television and radio repairing workshops opened in that area.

This business became very successful as people often needed to fix their television or radio as buying a new one would become very expensive. But for the last decade or so, the scenario took a grim turn for the repairmen. As Bangladesh started to become technologically more advanced, television and radio companies started to open their showrooms in the city. As a result of this, customers were given guarantee of the product they purchased for a certain period of time which meant that during that period the repairing charge was free of cost and in case the problem was irreparable, they replaced the product.

The demand for the television and radio repairmen started to fall and today it has reached a stage where these people don’t even have a handful of customers.

A blacksmith is a person who creates objects from iron or steel by forging the metal; i.e., by using tools to hammer, bend, cut, and otherwise shape it in its non-liquid form. Usually the metal is heated until it glows red or orange as part of the forging process. Blacksmiths produce things like wrought iron gates, grills, railings, light fixtures, furniture, sculpture, tools, agricultural implements, decorative and religious items, cooking utensils, horse shoes and weapons.

The profession of a blacksmith is not very easy. It is difficult in the sense that the working environment is not very healthy. The smoke that is emitted in the process of making objects is extremely unhealthy.A blacksmith continuously inhales that smoke all day long. But inspite of working in a hazardous environment, his income is very small. The life of a blacksmith is a vary sad tale.