The year that was
I had watched horse races on the race course, now Suhrawardy Uddyan, while I was in school in Dhaka. I can still visualize the fireworks at the old High Court building in the mid-1930s, celebrating the coronation or an anniversary of the royal head of the Raj (if I remember correctly). As a schoolboy, I used to walk to the Sir Salimullah Hall to the residence of Dr Shadidullah residing in a corner of the Hall as a teacher looking after the Hall. Today, if any of my relatives stayed in the Hall, I would be scared of going there. Even today I avoid the rickshaw ride through the public roads passing through the DU campus.
The politicians are teaching us the education of fear if that is the right term to use. The future of the young generation has been maimed permanently the very foundation for entry into life has been distorted. From where the future leadership would emerge? The branches are moving the trunk! The leaders cannot come out of the central core. Who are dependent on whom? We have inward-looking politics. What's for the voters? Politics and democracy have failed; we are ruled by slogans which have no roots.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. The boycott of the august parliament is a moral lapse; an institution is being ignored for petty upmanship.
The curse on the young nation is the destructive politics, cultivated by our leading political parties.The two leading political parties since 1991,are led, strangely enough, by same leaders. The party comes first, then the nation. It is an absurd political philosophy. The nation has to pay for it, sooner than later. The student community has been brain-washed .We had a fine civil service, now it has been tarnished; it is neither service nor civil. Politics has become a business, and public service is a hostage to political gunmen. Opportunism reigns the day. We live in the past and in the materialism of the present moment. The beckoning of the future does not hit us. Since we do not take notice, it will hit us later. There is a time for each and every event, and we are shackled, to what we call fate or destiny. We are slaves to our own doings. It is too late for the politicians to control it or reduce it. When the silence of the millions break, it would be thunderous!