Mr Air Conditioner commonly known to his friends as AC aka Cooler has been the victim of over-expectations. Just like a typical Bangali man or woman weathering the pressures to pass the BCS exam or get a chance in a good university, Cooler too was always subject to expectations beyond his capabilities.
Whenever summer arrived, the greedy lazy population of Bangladesh demanded the world of him, they expected Cooler not only to alleviate themselves of the heat but also to create an artificial winter during which they put on a heavy blanket in the snowless chills of the arctic.
Mr AC often lacks the willpower or electricity to perform his tasks, his impotent delivery and performance always had been a topic of much ridicule for most Bangalis who are never satisfied. Sometimes, Cooler wonders, how could they be so ungrateful? How can they be so cruel? Don’t they see my suffering? Don’t they understand I, with my limited filtration capacity and my overused CFC gas, am struggling to keep the temperatures below 16 even though I am not programmed to go below it in the first place! But who’s gonna make the Bangalis understand this?
However, Cooler might have something to be genuinely happy about this time around, for an adviser to the interim government has issued stern warnings. “Anyone using Mr. AC below 25 degrees will come under strict punishment,” he proclaimed, although the extent of its usefulness and implementation is a question. Hearing the statement, Cooler is caught between a dichotomy of thoughts. Because for the longest amount of time, Cooler witnessed the authoritarian rule of the Bangladesh government restricting speech and freedom of expression. As it is quite true for dictators everywhere, citizens under their rule do not enjoy the same freedom, and also no one in a free country could ever imagine that a government bureaucrat can tell them how they should live and what they should do with the devices they buy with their own money.
Alas! Mr AC wondered, “Can the government really restrict this, or are they just making a false promise?” AC’s cynical behaviour is not without merit, since the time AC was imported from China and granted citizenship to a local office building, he has seen promises being broken on a regular basis and outlandish claims made in vain. However, he could never have imagined such false promises or manic claims coming from a government that prides itself on being out of the crazy political bubble.
Mr AC understands that the blind does not know how a ray of light touches the clever eye, just as an entity born out of an authoritarian society often does not know how a free society operates. In the advisor’s diluted brain, the fog of ignorance influences him to spill out promises only a dictator would make, but he does this out of an agreeable heroic and simplistic mind, for he does not know anything better, and no amount of PhD and social status can take away his or rather this forsaken country’s narrow-minded thoughts.