By Anushay Hossain
Updated 2257 GMT (0657 HKT) July 7, 2016
(CNN)When I was growing up in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in the 1980s, I always wanted to live in a part of town called Gulshan. In my 7-year-old mind, it was the center of the universe. My family lived in an older (and not nearly as hip) part of Dhaka city, and they seemed to have no intention of ever moving from my paternal grandparent's home.
As the years went by, even as the rest of the city changed, Gulshan remained -- in my mind, at least -- the glamorous and unattainable part of town. Framed by its famous deep emerald Gulshan Lake, this was the part of Dhaka that always housed a big chunk of foreign embassies, the best restaurants and cafes, the most luxurious apartments and homes, and countless aid organization offices.
That is why it was so unreal -- and personally painful -- to see Gulshan thrust into the global spotlight in the worst possible way last Friday evening.
Twenty-one hostages, including 18 foreign nationals, were left dead in the upscale Holey Artisan Bakery after a deadly assault by gunmen was brought to an end as police stormed the building following an 11-hour siege. It was an attack unlike anything the country had ever seen.
Gulshan is not cordoned off like Iraq's Green Zone, where foreigners and diplomats live and work largely segregated from the local population. Because the aid community in the country is large, especially in the capital, Gulshan is essentially the center of the city for locals, foreigners and diplomats alike. This was almost certainly one of the reasons the attackers chose their target.
"Please pray for the departed and their families, and our staff who lived through the nightmare," Ali Arsalan, one of the co-owners of Holey, and a longtime family friend, wrote on his personal Facebook page. "What happened there is a terrible tragedy and we are shocked to the core. I never thought something created with so much love and a place where there was so much warmth and happiness, would be turned upside down like this. It is difficult to find today the strength to even think of carrying on."
Overnight, it seemed that Bangladesh had gone from being an example of development success and an admirable example of democracy in the Muslim world, to the world's next Pakistan. But the history of this tiny nation is critical to understanding the dangers to Bangladesh's secular future -- and why it is not yet destined to become another Karachi or Kabul.
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