Finding the meaning of a man's life: Tanveer Ahmed's memoir

Why doesn't it work better? Perhaps we in Australia can't fathom a country like Bangladesh, which Tanveer says is the size of Victoria but has 150 million people. The rituals and sacred things in that country seem difficult for an Australian mind to penetrate. Here is Don, a chubby young man with a deformed penis well known to everyone. Or a man called Hitler. The boy made it to the western suburbs, and on to live elsewhere (Vaucluse, perhaps?) and become a big success. This reader wants more. There are too many words, too much detail and not enough meaning or even entertainment.

After my students had finished a report on their research, I used to ask "So what?" Or, "what does it all mean?" If that question isn't answered, the report, or the book, lacks its necessary punch. These are some of the questions I wanted answered:

What does it mean to be a man, in Tanveer's culture? How is this different from being a man in Toongabbie or St Kilda? What if you're attracted to other men? How do parents, friends and so on usually react? What are the crises (if any) which make a man question his identity as a Muslim Bangladeshi?

How does a kind, thoughtful doctor bring himself to conduct electro-shock therapy? What DO our lives mean? Do we feel we are helping to save the world from suffering? Are we showing the world how to communicate better, as Steve Jobs might have done? Or is our life, as Macbeth said, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"?

There has to be a point to the story. At the end of his own autobiography, my father wrote…"I have had a beaut life…"

And thus the story of his life had a meaning for the reader. The story I've just read has some pleasing tales and some amusing stories. But I'm afraid Tanveer needed a tough editor with a frown, a mean eye and a sharp pen. That might have given us something that explained the lives of immigrants or of psychiatrists; or something that resonated with an Australian reader. His recent article on racism was much more relevant and meaningful to this reader. I'm confident Tanveer has a much better book in him.