For Dhaka's elderly, the morning is more than exercise

It was 10 minutes short of 6am. The sky over Ramna Park had barely turned from black to grey, when Md Badruzzaman, over 70, walked in through the gate with his wife beside him.

"I am not too well," he said. But he had come anyway, as he does most days. For Badruzzaman, a former joint secretary who retired from government service in 2016 and spent 12 to 14 years in various posts at Ramna Usha Sangha, showing up is the point. 

"If I want to stay healthy, my wife also needs to stay healthy," he said, explaining why he brings her along instead of leaving her at home. "If she is healthy, my sons and daughters will also be well."

By 6am, he was just one face among dozens. Under the trees near Ramna's badminton courts, a large circle of men and women — most past the age of retirement and some past 80 — had already begun stretching, breathing, folding into yoga postures or simply walking briskly in loops around the field. 

A few hundred metres away, another cluster stood in rows doing free-hand exercises to an instructor's count. 

Across town, on the promenade circling Dhanmondi Lake, older residents in tracksuits and shawls were doing much the same, greeting each other by name.

This is Dhaka's other morning rush — quieter than the one that clogs the roads a few hours later, but no less regular. Every day, while much of the city is still asleep, hundreds of elderly men and women converge on the capital's parks to exercise, stretch, practise yoga, play badminton and, as several put it, feel like children again.

They are strikingly energetic for their age, and eager conversationalists — within minutes of being approached, several of them launched into their own theories of health, family and old age.

Some belong to organisations decades old, with elections, guidebooks and hundreds of members; others simply gather informally, day after day, until the gathering itself becomes an institution. 

What ties them together is not just the exercise but the community that forms around it — and, one member argued, a marked contrast with a younger generation that sleeps through the mornings they have reclaimed.

From a few friends to an institution

The scale of it is easy to miss from outside. At Ramna Usha Sangha alone, roughly 500 people are members, according to Nasiruddin Masud, who joined in 2008. Over the decades, they have included senior judges, tax commissioners and secretaries and, once, even a serving president. 

The organisation was founded in 1985 by Keshab Chandra Adhikari. It holds committee elections every two years, publishes a members' guidebook with photographs and addresses, and keeps a memorial list of members who have died, marking their passing each Ramadan with a doa and iftar.

Nearby, at Ramna Yoga, instructor Mizanur Rahman said 62 separate groups practise in the park, each formed the same informal way. "It is not that someone suddenly comes with a plan or a memorandum," he said. "A few people with similar interests come together and, over time, decide that they should start doing some yoga or physical exercises."

His own group has grown to more than 400 members, about 100 of them turning up on an average day, led by a rotating panel of 11 instructors. Members range from their 50s to past 90, with several over 80.

At Dhanmondi Lake, the equivalent is Poromayu Sangha, close to 30 years old and roughly 150 strong. Some members, including a 64-year-old interviewed for this story, have attended for 25 years; the oldest active ones are in their mid-70s. Beyond exercise, the group meets for breakfast at a restaurant every Friday and goes on an annual picnic.

Not every gathering is this formal. Near Shantinagar, Abdul Mottalib, 65, exercises with about 20 others who have no name, no committee and no membership list — just a shared spot and a shared hour. A former student leader, he left politics because, in his words, "the whole business of being a political wheeler-dealer does not suit my brain". "We chat and exercise," he said simply.

Whether structured or informal, the pattern repeats: what begins as a handful of people standing together hardens, over years, into routine, and the routine into belonging. Abdul Mannan, 68, who discovered the yoga sessions after reading a book on the subject and wandering past the group near Kakrail Mosque, described the feeling precisely. "You can think of this place as being somewhat like a school classroom," he said. "We have a sense of unity. Like a class, we come at a fixed time and leave at a fixed time."

The range of activities

What actually happens in these circles is more varied than a simple morning walk. At Ramna Usha Sangha, members split after the main session into a group that practises Quantum — a form of yoga done lying down — and another that plays badminton. At Ramna Yoga, Rahman runs sessions in careful sequence: free-hand exercises to warm up and loosen the body, then standing yoga postures, then sitting postures led by a second instructor, and finally lying postures that lead into a short meditation through Shavasana.

"This is a short meditation session, usually lasting two or three minutes," he explained. Once a week or once a month, the group holds a longer meditation of 30 to 60 minutes for those who can stay. The session closes with pranayama breathing exercises and a laughing session. "At the end, we laugh together for a few minutes," Rahman said — the kind of laughter that first drew this reporter to the practice, one morning at Dhanmondi Lake, as strangers doubled over in a circle before sunrise.

At the Ramna yoga gathering Abdul Mannan attends, the structure is tighter still: the session runs from 6am to about 7:20am, followed by roughly 15 minutes of acupuncture. None of it costs a formal fee. The groups run on voluntary monthly contributions, mostly to pay the men who lay out mats and sweep the ground, and are led entirely by volunteer instructors rather than paid trainers. "There is no financial matter involved in what we do here," Badruzzaman said. "We exercise selflessly."

Why it matters — for the body and for each other

Ask any of them what exercise has done for their health, and the answers come quickly and specifically. Mannan said he had chronic pain in his hand and elsewhere before he started. "Now, alhamdulillah, that pain is gone," he said, adding that coming to the park makes him feel cheerful inside, which, he believes, protects his physical health as much as the exercise itself. The 64-year-old Poromayu Sangha member, 25 years into the routine, reported no diabetes and no major health problems, and credited the daily habit.

But the benefit these elderly Dhakaites describe most often is not physical at all — it is the community itself. "There is a big difference between those who come here and those who do not come and remain lying at home," Masud said, describing better health both at home and "in our professional lives" among the group's older, still-working members.

For Badruzzaman, it is the camaraderie. "When we come here, it feels as if we are back in school, among our school friends," he said. "We joke with one another and behave playfully... Suppose one of us is a judge. If I address him informally as 'tumi', it does not feel awkward here." He described the most senior members exercising with "extraordinary energy". "They behave almost like children," he said. "They laugh, joke around and enjoy themselves."

For Rahman, the physical and the social are simply inseparable, and he summed up the philosophy behind his sessions in something close to a slogan: "Stay healthy, keep a cheerful mind, remain active and live a happy life." Staying active, he added, does not have to mean holding a job. "If I spend time chatting with friends, that is also an activity. If I spend time with my family, that is also an activity."

Hundreds of elderly men and women converge on the capital’s parks to exercise, stretch, practise yoga, play badminton and, as several put it, feel like children again. Photo: Mehedi Hasan

A generation apart

Masud was blunt about the contrast with the young. When this reporter remarked that his own generation usually goes to sleep at dawn, while the elderly come to the park every day to exercise, Masud ran with the observation.

"I still find that my son is awake and using the computer" when he gets up for Fajr prayers, he said. "They stay awake throughout the night... They wake up at noon." 

He linked the pattern to something broader: young people, he said, often have thinner ties to their neighbourhoods and families than to their online friends.

Against that, the elderly of Ramna and Dhanmondi Lake offer something like a counter-model. They are out before sunrise, in groups that double as a social circle, an exercise class and, for many, a second family.

By 7:30am, the crowds had thinned. Badruzzaman and his wife headed home together; Rahman's group dispersed after its final stretch; the circle near Shantinagar broke apart until the next morning. What remains, members say, is not just a looser body but a fuller day — the sense, as more than one of them put it, of having already lived a small, happy life before the rest of the city has even woken up.