Thirty-five years on
Like most of my generation I grew up studying text-books that had carefully doctored history. In fact, like many I grew up with an indifferent attitude toward the country. The politics has always been totally confusing, and I realized very early that to make a decent, honourable living I could not afford to focus on anything except my immediate road-map of life, sketched by my family and teachers.
I never really bothered about politics, not even when I saw abject poverty all over the country while every politician seemed to own the most expensive car. I know you get the picture. So what prompted me to think about it today? It was a documentary I watched with my friends, Muktir Gaan, as part of our December 16 homage earlier on the day. I had heard and seen pictures of the liberation war before, but this is the closest I have ever been to the war.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
I left the theatre trying to answer a question: What does this war mean to me? It is temporary bouts of pain for all those who so bravely went to fight against the Pakistani forces, pain that comes and goes only on those special days. The next day the past has to be left in the past as we move on to face the struggles of the common man in this country.
A second question leads from my first and that is: Where did we go wrong? Was it when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman pardoned all the traitors to this land? Was it when he was murdered for the sin of having been larger than life, or is it that the Pakistanis had succeeded in crippling the nation when they killed our intellectuals en-masse, leaving a vacuum, only to give rise to a generation without any moral values? I do not know the reason but what I do know is that we went wrong, very, very wrong,
As I watched the brave young men and women who waged the liberation war, in that documentary, I realized that they were far greater people than we can ever be. They took their stand against a much more powerful enemy. For us, we can hardly identify who the enemies are, even when we can, we lend them a platform to have their say.
I almost feel like believing that a whole nation has been brainwashed by some bizarre force, but I know that's not the reason. A more sound, more credible reason is perhaps that the common man knows that life doesn't change much for him, no matter who is in power, and so each time he looks for immediate gains. And this is what has brought us to this situation today.
A country in the hands of corrupt men, men who have compromised with themselves and have compromised the country, a constitution that is used to serve specific needs even while we know that it was written for upholding higher moral values and not vice versa, this is the reality we live through.
The strangeness of it all is that every single person knows the truth. A few may have blinded themselves to it in their own parochial interests, but the greater mass knows it all. And that is where all my hopes lie, each time I walk the streets of Dhaka and see the street urchins, beggars, rickshaw-pullers, everyone struggling to make a living. I just hope we can all wake up in time to save a nation. Thirty-five years has already been too long.