The slur had been picked up, dusted off, and worn as a badge of honour.

It was, in a strange way, the most honest political conversation that the subcontinent had seen in years.

Which brings me to us. Bangladesh. Land of rivers, resilience, and roughly nine lakh graduates who woke up this morning with a degree in one hand and nothing in the other.

If India’s Chief Justice had looked west, he might have needed a much bigger costume.

Here is a number worth sitting with: 13.5 per cent. That is Bangladesh’s unemployment rate among university graduates in 2024, the highest of any education level in the country. Let that sentence breathe for a moment. The more you study in Bangladesh, the less likely you are to find a job. We have engineered, possibly by accident, a system that punishes ambition. A person who never finished secondary school has a better shot at employment than someone who spent four years in university. You could call this ironic. Economists call it a “skills mismatch.” Most graduates just call it their life.

The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics puts the total number of unemployed in 2024 at 26.24 lakh. Of those, 8.85 lakh hold university degrees. A government white paper, submitted to the interim administration, did not mince words and called the unemployment of educated youth a “ticking time bomb.” Not a challenge. Not a concern. A ticking time bomb. The kind of language bureaucrats usually avoid, which tells you the situation must be genuinely alarming even to people paid to stay calm.

So who exactly is the Bangladeshi cockroach?

He is 26 years old. He graduated from a public university in Rajshahi or Chattogram or Jahangirnagar, somewhere respectable, with a degree in something sensible: business administration, perhaps, or English literature, or, God help him, Computer Science. He spent four years attending lectures that taught him the theory of supply and demand while the actual market outside the classroom had no demand for him whatsoever.

He has appeared for the BCS exam. Twice. Maybe even three times. Not because it is his dream, but because it is the only door in the building that looks like it might open. The government accounts for roughly 6 per cent of total employment in this country, and yet half the educated youth in Bangladesh are queued outside that one door, CVs in hand, quietly hoping. The other doors, private investment, industrial expansion, entrepreneurship, remain jammed. Private sector credit growth slid from 9.86 per cent to 7.66 per cent in the second half of 2024, and capital machinery imports dropped over 21 per cent in the same fiscal period. Translation: businesses are not expanding. No expansion means no new jobs. No new jobs means longer queues at that one government door.

Meanwhile, approximately 22 to 23 lakh new young people enter the job market every single year.

You do not need an economics degree to see that math is broken. Though if you have one, it will not help you find work either.

The World Bank tracked something quietly devastating: the unemployment rate among tertiary-educated youth in Bangladesh rose from 9.7 per cent in 2013 to 27.8 per cent by 2022. That is a near-tripling in under a decade. A generation of people followed all the rules — study hard, get the degree, wait for your reward — and then discovered that the reward was reclassified while they were waiting.

An ILO report from 2024 placed South Asia’s youth unemployment at a 15-year high of 15.1 per cent. Regional solidarity has never been so bleak.

There is a particular cruelty in this that we do not talk about enough. A young person who never had access to education and cannot find work is facing poverty. A young person who did have access to education and still cannot find work is facing something else — a specific, grinding humiliation. They did everything society told them to. They are not victims of laziness. They are victims of a promise that was made and not kept.

An HR manager at a Dhaka multinational recently explained the problem with clinical efficiency: “Universities produce thousands of graduates each year, but many of them lack the practical skills employers are looking for.” This is true and also spectacularly beside the point. The universities are not solely to blame for producing graduates who cannot solve Python problems or run a pivot table. We built an education system in a certain era, for a certain economy, and then the economy moved on without updating the curriculum. Blaming the graduates for this is like blaming passengers for the train running late.

One in three graduates, according to BBS survey data, remains unemployed for up to two years after finishing their degree. Nearly 36 per cent of unemployed young people look for jobs primarily through relatives and friends. Not LinkedIn. Not a career portal. Relatives and friends. Which means the job market is, to a significant extent, still running on who you know, not what you studied for four expensive years.

Back to the cockroach.

What made India’s cockroach movement resonate was not the costume or the memes. It was the rage underneath, dressed up in humour because naked rage gets you lathi-charged. Young people took an insult, reversed it, and said: fine, if this is what we are to you, then watch us be it proudly.

Bangladesh has had its own version of this conversation. The July uprising of 2024 was, at its roots, partly a reckoning with exactly this — a generation that had done everything right and received injustice in return. The quota protests were about government jobs, yes, but they were also about something bigger: the feeling that the system was designed to frustrate them, and that frustration had finally outrun patience.

The cockroaches did not disappear after the movement. They are still here, sitting with their degrees, refreshing job portals, waiting for the BCS results, borrowing money from parents who are themselves running out of it to lend.

The question is not who the Bangladeshi cockroach is. That is easy to answer.

The harder question is: who keeps calling them one?