The Boy Who Read Everything

I was an emotional kid.

I read everything I could find. Rapid readers at school. Bengali short stories. Then novels. Buddhadeb Guha, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Somoresh Majumdar, Rabindranath Tagore. Then spy thrillers, Masud Rana, Sherlock Holmes, Jules Verne, Dan Brown. Then the heavier ones. Dostoevsky. Tolstoy. Remarque.

When a book moved me I wanted to talk about it. Share the feeling with someone. I would get excited and find my nearest friends and tell them what I had just discovered.

That boy wanted a simple life. Books. Poems. Quiet evenings with people he loved. No rush. No competition. No hunger for more than what was actually needed.

He had no idea what was waiting for him after school.

Thirteen Schools Before SSC

My father was a government employee. He transferred often. Before I completed my SSC I had studied in thirteen different schools. Bogura, Ishwardi, Cumilla, Chittagong, Mymensingh, Tangail, Dhaka. New schools, new teachers, new friends, over and over again.

It made me adaptable. It also made me quiet in a particular way. You learn not to put down roots too deeply when you know you will be moving again soon.

But it also opened windows. Seeing many places, many classrooms, many different kinds of people taught me early that the world was larger and more varied than any single school wanted to admit.

Every teacher I had, in all those thirteen schools, delivered roughly the same message. Study hard. Get good results. Get a good job. That is enough. That is the whole plan.

Some of them added something about being a good person. Morally. Intellectually. But none of them had a clear picture of what waited outside. The ones who knew the real world had never taught in a school. The ones who taught in schools had never really lived in the world they were preparing us for.

When students asked difficult questions the answer was always the same. You will understand when you get there.

After HSC the War Began

After finishing HSC I stepped outside and felt something shift.

I had read about life in hundreds of books. Felt it in poems. Imagined it quietly in the back of classrooms across thirteen schools. And then I looked around and saw what was actually happening.

Admission test wars. Thousands of students competing for a handful of university seats. Get selected or be considered a failure. No alternatives discussed. No other paths shown. Just the single narrow door everyone was pushing toward.

I tried for engineering. I did not get through. I dropped a year. Went back to my grandmother’s home in the village. Changed tracks entirely and enrolled in commerce. A guilt settled inside me quietly. I had failed my parents. I had not made it through the right door.

That boy who got excited about books and wanted to share ideas with friends started going quieter. Not all at once. Slowly. The way a light dims rather than switches off.

What the System Actually Rewards

I spent years inside the system after that. Education. Articleship. Jobs. Offices.

I watched carefully. The system said it rewarded skill, hard work, dedication, meeting deadlines. That was what every interview, every performance review, every manager’s speech talked about.

What actually got rewarded was different.

Strong connections. Knowing the right people. Saying yes sir, no sir, right sir. Oiling the right relationships. Being agreeable. Being available. Never pushing back. Never questioning too loudly.

Skilled people waited. Dedicated people waited. Sometimes at the very end of a long career something came through. But by then so much life had already passed. What do you do with a reward that arrives when you are too tired to enjoy it.

And if you made a mistake the response was immediate. No review. No conversation. Just the door.

That is the system. It asks for everything and offers fragile ground in return.

Be Drunk on Something of Your Own

There is a poem I came across when I was young. Baudelaire, translated into Bengali by Sunil Gangopadhyay. The poem says you must always be drunk. On wine, on poetry, on virtue. Whatever you choose. Just be drunk on something. Otherwise the weight of time will crush you.

I understood that poem differently at different ages.

When I was young it felt like permission. To feel things deeply. To care about something beyond marks and certificates and job titles.

Now I understand it as a warning.

If you do not choose what to be drunk on, the system will choose for you. It will hand you ambition dressed as security. Consumption dressed as success. Busyness dressed as purpose. And you will drink from that cup for years before you notice what is missing.

The system does not reward dreamers. It rewards the obedient. It needs people who follow instructions, meet targets, stay late, and do not ask why too often. It is very good at making this feel normal. At making the dream feel childish and the obedience feel like maturity.

What Young People Are Walking Into

I look at young people today and I see confusion wearing the face of confidence.

Social media fills every quiet moment. Scrolling, watching, reacting. No space left to sit with a thought long enough to follow it somewhere. When you read a book you visualize. You think. You wander inside the story. Scrolling does the opposite. It keeps the surface busy so the deeper questions never quite form.

My son is four and a half years old. We try to keep screens away from him. But I see what is happening around us. Teenagers living inside their phones. Young adults chasing trends, copying lifestyles, measuring themselves against images that were designed to make them feel behind.

No direction. Just motion.

What I Would Tell a Young Dreamer

You need the certificate. I understand that. Get it. The system will not leave you alone until you have it. But do not give the system everything while you are getting it.

Build something on your own while you are still young enough to start small without it feeling like failure. A small business where you are the only employee. A small farm. A workshop. Something online. Anything that belongs to you and does not depend on someone else’s decision to keep running.

There is no such thing as a secure job. There is only the illusion of security dressed in a monthly salary. One decision from above and the floor disappears. You have seen it happen. So have I.

Be drunk on something the system cannot take from you.

Your ideas. Your craft. Your small plot of land. Your ability to need less than they told you that you need. Your family under one roof. Your own path walked at your own pace.

Eat what you like. Build what you love. Earn small if you must. Drive small if that is what it takes. So what. You will enjoy more. You will owe less. You will answer to fewer people.

They chose their path. Intentionally or without knowing. Let them walk it. You do not need to follow.

The Boy Is Still Here

That emotional kid who read everything and wanted a simple peaceful life did not disappear.

He went quiet for a while. The system is good at that. It buries the dreamer under enough urgency and obligation that he stops making noise.

But he is still here.

Maybe it is late. But late is better than never.

I started building. And I will.