Tommy Miah: Bringing something back.
Tommy Miah is a highly acclaimed chief who studied in the UK and has recently returned to set up Heritage Restaurant. He couldn’t be with us on the day, but provided us with an overview of his experience of migration and return.

The United Kingdom has a very large Bangladeshi community, standing at around an excess of 800,000; in fact, this is the largest congregation of Bangladeshi’s outside of Bangladesh. In modern Britain today the second generation of British Bengalis are contributing heavily to the community and many are studying on high demand courses and moving into well paid professions.

However, this is all well and good, but this new and emerging generation needs to be aware that their parent’s home country is a poverty stricken third world country that needs assistance from the West. This could be in terms of short term help where most individuals would set the foundations in terms of knowledge and expertise to encourage Bangladesh to develop.

The so called ‘Indian Restaurant’ in the UK is very well known to the Bengali community. In fact over 90 percent of them are run by the Bengalis but in spite of this the average person in the UK still refers to the food as ‘Indian’. Personally I have found that in Bangladesh itself, the traditional food has been replaced by other influences. An example of this is that many food outlets offer ‘Chinese’ or ‘Thai’ food. This is not bad idea in itself, but our traditional foods are being lost.

Due to this, I decided to become more involved in Bangladesh. For example, I am heavily involved in the Dhaka Orphanage at Sreerpur and as a result other British Bengalis have noticed the success of such projects and several more have been setup. The launch of ‘Heritage Restaurant’ was intended to reinvent our national dishes, hence the name ‘Heritage’, likewise this has sparked the interests of other British Bengalis to bring their own individuality and expertise to Bangladesh.

Recently we set up a catering institute in Dhaka to train and equip people to work in the dynamic hospitality Industry, be it locally or overseas. I work very closely with social organisations and NGOs back home to make people aware of the social issues that need priority focus.

Furthermore, I too have learned a few things along the way from my home country. In conclusion I stress that British Bengalis or Bengalis from a wider perspective only need to do a little to provide long term benefits to Bangladesh, a country that we care about and where our roots lie, to keep it moving in the right direction.