Most Read

Ekushey thoughts

6 March 2004, 18:00 PM
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
By Md. Abdul Hamid, Asian University of Bangladesh
6 March 2004, 18:00 PM
Twenty-first February culminated as a moment of victory that defines the source of glory, a sign of auspicious future of this very country, our beloved Bangladesh and is an occasion for remembering the martyrs of the great Language Movement -- Rafiq, Jabbar, Salam, Barkat and many more. It helped to shape the social and political events that followed so decisively that Ekushey has rightly been termed the turning point in the history of another movement for a separate cultural and linguistic identity which culminated in an independent Bangladesh.

On this very day, I was at the TSC, University of Dhaka, and we were holding a blood donation programme organised by Old Rajshahi Cadets Association (ORCA). As an ORCA member I had been there for the whole day filling out the forms of the donors and helping them donate blood. Normally, after the donation of blood, donors are offered a little refreshment. Suddenly, a man in tattered clothes came and snatched away the plate crying that he did not take his meal for the whole day.

As the day wore on, the life blood seemed to ebb away from me, and in that emptiness a heavy despair gathered momentum. I sat suspended in a state of complete nullity suffocated with the question inside me, do we have any success to be proud of as a nation? This hungry, street-living man is the symbol of many people like him deprived of normal life.

Google News LinkFor all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.

I took some moments from my volunteer work to have a short conversation with him. And immediately we two were joined by two more persons who were also looking for food, money or whatever they could get from the crowd. I was asked how they were surviving.

The narration was so pathetic that moved me a lot.

I think this is time to rethink with our unfaltering spirit. It is time to think with the deepest desire to go on into the shaping of the social, political and cultural way of our lives. Then it should be a decision, a promise, a next good step to do something fruitful for the deprived people. Only then the departed souls may rest in peace.