He called Dhaka a 'Rape Capital' and people listened - Interview With Sameerscane

Before he was known as the voice behind "Sameerscane," a digital platform tackling everything your dinner table doesn’t - Sameer Ahmed was just another kid from Sunbeams, swaddled in the silken cocoon of Dhaka elite. Ministers, moguls, Mercedes Benzes, the whole scene. But even as a child, he could see through the gloss. “Little 10-year-olds walking around thinking they were somebody,” he recalls, “when really, we were just kids bloated with borrowed status.” He includes himself in that critique.

Image @sameerscane

At age 14, Sameer was uprooted and dropped into suburban Australia, a place he imagined would feel like an episode of Gossip Girl, but quickly revealed itself as a landscape of bullying, racism, and cultural alienation. Overweight, brown, and stuttering, he became a moving target for cruelty. “I had an asthma attack after being tabletop-pranked. Ambulance was called. School cleared out. My mom sent me back in two days.”

What followed were months of isolation, cyberbullying, and an eventual punch to the face of a classmate that finally made it stop. He was suspended. He was changed.

Dhaka Revisited: From Drive-Through Privilege to Street-Level Politics

Even while living in Perth, his body overseas and heart still hanging around Kamalapur Station, Sameer kept returning to Dhaka every six months. His father, who had climbed the socioeconomic ladder from Old Dhaka to upper-class comfort, now glided through the city in air-conditioned cars with tinted windows and shawarma served dashboard-side. “I realized this wasn’t real life anymore. It was curated nostalgia.”

Desperate to pierce through the privilege, Sameer staged a small rebellion, announcing in front of his extended family that he would be going out with his uncle, forcing his parents’ approval. “That’s when I really started seeing Dhaka,” he says, not through a car window, but through the dirt-caked slats of train seats and the stifling heat of Motijheel’s brokerage alleys.

Sameer wasn’t looking for hardship tourism, he was looking for home. “When I stood at Kamalapur for the first time, something clicked. This wasn’t background noise. These were my people.”

The Wake-Up Call: A Nap on a Van and a Dinner with Corruption

Then came the moment. On a humid Friday in Puran Dhaka, overwhelmed by the sensory chaos, Sameer was seconds from complaining, until he saw a boy his age passed out on a van, dead asleep amidst honking, sweat, and city rot. “I looked at myself nice watch, expensive shoes and I just froze.”

That same night, he was taken to a VIP dinner where a man openly bragged about bribing his way to power. The dissonance? Sharp enough to split bone. “These are the people tasked with saving the people I saw this morning? Something’s seriously wrong.”

Sameerscane Was Born, Out of Rage, Notes, and a Failed First Video

Instead of joining someone else’s youth org, Sameer built his own. Why? Because giving out food to slum kids wasn’t cutting it. “Their biggest problem wasn’t food or clothes. It was rats. Rats were burrowing holes, making their babies sick, and they had no one to complain to.”

He started writing notes. Observations turned into anger. Anger turned into ideas. He called up a friend from Dhaka, an editor and decided video would be the medium. “One person, 10 people, or a million. A video had reach.”

The first video bombed internally. His co-founder called it “shit.” But his team of four stuck by him. “If they wanted Hasan Minhaj with 50 editors, I wasn’t that. But for someone who’d never made a video? It was a 10.”

He posted it. It hit 10K in two days. Then came the next one. The rest is algorithmic history.

The Hate? Comes with the Hashtag

Social media fame isn’t for the thin-skinned, and Sameer learned that quickly. “Our first video on rape? I got destroyed. Because it was in English. People called it propaganda, anti-state. I couldn’t sleep.”

But hate became part of the job description. “People forget you’re human. One bad video and it’s open season. And yet, you’re still expected to be okay with it. That’s the irony of trying to do good online, you become a punching bag first, a person second.”

On Inequality, Hope, and Not Planning a Damn Thing

Ask him about Bangladesh’s biggest problem and he won’t say traffic or electricity. “Inequality, across class, gender, access, everything. That’s the root.” But he’s not in the business of despair. “Saying ‘this country is finished’ does nothing. You have to believe there’s hope. That we’ll see some real change in our time.”

What about the future of Sameerscane? He shrugs. “I don’t believe in five-year plans. My job is to focus on the next video. That’s all I can give 100% to. Anything else is a distraction.”

Sameerscane: Now a Movement, Not Just a Handle

The team has grown to 22 people across 7 countries, from scriptwriters who never want to be on camera to camera guys who couldn’t write a caption if they tried. “We’re not colleagues. We’re co-conspirators.”

Most of them have never even met in person. But that hasn’t stopped them from building a platform that actually listens. That documents. That refuses to sugarcoat.

Sameer Ahmed didn’t set out to be an influencer. He set out to be loud where silence was the norm. And maybe that’s what makes Sameerscane so unsettling: it holds up a mirror and dares you to stop looking away.