Blowing Up Bridges

(Audio Deep Dive English; Audio Deep Dive Bangla)

With a little breathing room between semesters, I found myself wandering through old war films, which is how one accidentally relearns uncomfortable truths about human behavior, because wars—ethically questionable but pedagogically efficient—have always understood one thing very clearly: if you want to reduce a threat, you blow up the bridges. Not because bridges are evil, but because bridges connect things, and connections are inconvenient. Cinema has reinforced this lovingly for decades—A Bridge Too Far, The Bridge on the River Kwai—entire traditions built around the idea that you don’t negotiate with the bridge, you remove it, preferably in a dramatic collapse with smoke, water, and unmistakable finality, because the real advantage isn’t just that the bridge is gone, it’s that you were there to watch it fall. Once the bridge crumbles, the threat is reduced, the geography is rewritten, the map changes, the story changes, and suddenly you’re no longer reacting, you’re managing, and if we’re honest there’s a dark pleasure in witnessing something vital collapse and knowing it can never come back to bother you again. Take that logic out of war films and drop it—gently if you like—into human relationships and the strategy remains intact. The bridges now are made of shared memories, overlapping social circles, mutual friends, lingering presence, emotional backchannels, and when someone begins to feel like a threat—emotionally, narratively, existentially—the instinct is the same: blow up the bridge and stay close enough to confirm the damage. It’s rarely cinematic, no explosions or soundtracks, just strategic silences, denied presence, polite distance framed as maturity, but the outcome is identical—the connection crumbles, the route back disappears, and the one who initiated it watches carefully because partial destruction is risky, a damaged bridge can still be crossed, a half-ended relationship can still haunt. That’s why people insist on closure, on being there, on making sure, standing on the riverbank of their own lives waiting for the last piece to sink, because there is comfort in witnessing finality and knowing the threat has been permanently neutralized. Once the bridge is gone, the narrative shifts, pressure eases, new stories can be written without interruption, and this logic plays out everywhere—from wars to offices to families to friendships to romance. We pretend it’s different because we don’t use dynamite, but the principle is unchanged: remove the connection, observe the collapse, secure the advantage, rewrite the story. Which is why that old line survives with such confidence: All is fair in love and war. It’s not a justification. It’s a confession. Just like the Doors stated in their song, “It is the end,” like the collapse of the bridge on the River Kwai or the erasure of posibility of creating shared memories.