I am 70 + years old and certainly on the final patch of my life. That doesn't bother me much though. It's not death that makes many anxious but the process of dying and the attendant servants of the "eternal footman who holds my coat and snickers" sarcastically.

In Bangladesh "dying is a tiresome business" as anyone who dies regularly knows. Not only does it involve medical bills beyond the capacity of families to pay but most are quite unnecessary. As a friend who runs a clinic once told me, "a few deaths per month covers a lot of the staff salaries." Let's face it, death brings profit to many but not to the dying's families.

Death is also an exit and if you stretch your imagination, a migration to another world if you will. Changing addresses is so common but something we often deny we should do regularly.

A brief walk through past chaos

We now live in Bangladesh but were part of Pakistan, its eastern wing and before that of colonial Bengal and for a brief period - 1905-11- East Bengal. As a part time teacher and full-time researcher of history, I know the phases and stages well. And this is the observation. It has always been a chaotic experience. Stability has not been part of our life at any time in history.

Some would like to say that once the villages were so nice and sheltered and nothing nasty ever happened in the sylvan paradise of ours but they would not be saying it based on facts. The rural population have had horrendous experiences ranging from extreme poverty, high taxation, famine, peasant resistances and political upheavals. Villages were never the smooth paradise we like to imagine they were.

Romantic Bengali novelists or Facebook posters might deny this but not historians. In fact, the much better off class, group, social segment of the past was the urban middle class. And to be honest, those of us who are now in the seventies probably lived the best phase of history of this land socio-economically though politically it was in turmoil.

Rural-urban switch

Of course, we had the 1971 phase which was horrendous and what came after was less violent but more chaotic but we survived. However, after all these years, that economic bedrock that the middle class -the formal sector - hung on to despite political uncertainties have been rocked and the seismic shock has begun to shake all of us.

Ironically, in the last three decades it's the rural population who have prospered far more in proportion to all other sections of society. The rural Bangladeshi who now fly off to different parts of the world as low-end workers or smuggle themselves to unsafe destinations have all gained.

Not only are the villages far better off than they ever were in history and certainly in proportion to the city population but they are keeping the silly urban middle class alive not to mention the state apparatus.

So, like it or not, the villages have triumphed and the urban zones, the official formal sector have become terminally ill and kept breathing artificially. And just as a dying patient who is a relative is kept alive at a ruinous cost to all, we are doing the same.

As I see it

As a university teacher I meet young bright minds coming from the middle class, distant and close. My workplace is an upper end private University and draws students from all over Bangladesh particularly the district and divisional towns. Their parents are spending a huge sum of money to fund them through years of expensive education in the hope they will be higher end wage earners. The irony is few will be able to.

It's the public universities which produce government officials and even many private sector leaders whose mentality is manufactured there. Coming from middle-class homes with a quality mind they graduate to compete for GOB and similar jobs. It's the ultimate elite production factory of the formal sector whose education is subsidised by the Government who needs such souls to keep them going.

Life is beautiful for them because home will not only provide jobs, salaries, subsidised land and housing for life not to mention pension and of course other not so polite sounding extra-earning potential. The official middle class has happily gone to sleep in the government quarter.

So what should the potential left out middle class like those who are my students do? They should do what we have done for ages when facing a crisis and finding no other way have done- fly away. Safety, security, property can't be offered to them by Bangladesh but [possible abroad. I would say to them, don't be embarrassed by what others say. Human history is about migration and so follow your ancestral instincts.

So, go but before you do, find out what the job market there looks like, which skill is in demand and prepare accordingly and you will prosper there. Spending all that money on a dying relative has zero value because it's already dead or dying and doesn't make any evolutionary common sense. weekly be ready when you fly away.

Bon voyage. .