How a Nation Learned to Stay Busy, Broke, and Baffled
There are days when being Bangladeshi middle class feels like living inside a malfunctioning time machine—one that jolts you between decades but never quite lands in the present. One week you’re standing in a queue for gas cylinders as if it’s 1988; the next, you’re paying through your nose for a coffee because Dhaka thinks it’s Dubai. The middle class in this country does not move through time. Time moves through them, aggressively, without permission, always extracting a fee.
To be middle class in Bangladesh is to inhabit a psychological condition more than an economic category. You live in a constant negotiation with rising prices, falling dignity, and a landscape where your aspirations run faster than your salary ever will. You spend your days chasing comfort, only to discover you’ve purchased anxiety instead. You send your children to private schools hoping they’ll read Shakespeare; instead, they learn about inferiority complexes and Instagram.
Every middle-class household has the same rituals: the father staring at the electricity bill as if it’s a ransom note; the mother performing mathematical miracles in kitchen budgeting that the Finance Ministry could learn from; the children silently calculating whether their parents will forgive them for wanting new shoes.
What makes this class unique is the perpetual state of “almostness.” They almost get the promotion. They almost afford the holiday. They almost buy the apartment, only to discover the developer has absconded. Their lives are an anthology of near-misses, narrated by optimism but choreographed by inflation.
Bangladesh’s middle class is the country’s shock absorber. They keep the economy running, institutions surviving, and democracy vaguely respectable. Yet they are treated like an overused battery—drained repeatedly, rarely recharged. They pay taxes that never benefit them, tolerate governance that never improves, and vote for leaders who promise change while practising déjà vu.
The middle class lives in a hyper-competitive ecosystem of comparison. Your neighbour owns a new car; you feel poor. Your colleague gets a promotion; you feel incompetent. Your friend’s child goes abroad; you feel like you failed as a parent. Bangladeshi society has perfected the art of turning milestones into weapons.
But beneath the exhaustion lies a quiet dignity. Middle-class families are experts in the invisible labour of holding a country together. They are the ones who, despite everything, still insist on honesty, still panic over integrity, still negotiate with their conscience every time corruption knocks. They are the custodians of decency in a landscape where decency is mocked as naivety.
And perhaps the most beautiful tragedy of all: they never stop dreaming. Every middle-class parent believes their child will escape this loop. Every year, new hopes are planted—in coaching centres, borrowed books, and the grammar of ambition. The time machine may be broken, but their belief in tomorrow isn’t.
Bangladesh celebrates its billionaires and romanticises its poverty fighters. But the true heart of this republic beats inside the middle class, where hope is the only currency that has not yet devalued.