March 08, 2007	Thursday	Safar 18, 1428

DHAKA: Tired of trying to get a bit of peace and quiet in one of the world’s most densely populated countries, a Bangladeshi man with a head for heights has hit on the perfect solution.

Each day carpenter and aspiring writer Salim Hossen Gaus, aged 25, winches himself 30 metres in a precarious home-made pulley to a small wooden platform he has built at the top of a palm tree.

“I spend four to five hours minimum in the tree reading and writing, listening to the birds chirping,” he said, adding that his favourite authors were Shakespeare and the Nobel laureate, Bengali writer and poet Rabindranath Tagore.

“The isolation is very pleasing. I don’t get any disturbance from people and no-one can distract me from my literary works,” he said.

Gaus, from the south-western Jessore district, said he enjoyed the tranquillity of his tree house so much he had even taken to eating meals and sleeping there sometimes.

“I feel a deep affinity with nature when I am in the tree writing poetry in the moonlight or looking at the sun rising or setting,” he said.

Other villagers at first dismissed Gaus as insane but are now clamouring for their own tree-top hideaways.

“They used to call me mad but many people have become enthusiasts. Now they ask me to build the same kind of tree house for them too,” he added.

Bangladesh with a population of 144 million is the world’s most crowded nations.

It has 834 people per square-kilometre area, according to the 2001 census of the country.—AFP