Omor Ekushey

The day started with a complete tour of the British Museum along with Babul Bhai, the painter/artist friend of mine who 'Londoned' himself just two weeks back. After a tiring yet worthwhile experience of the world's fascinating antiques we headed towards Bethnal Green, the Bengali dominated neighbourhood, to get introduced to the folks of 'Betar Bangla', the new Bangla radio in London which has got a recent licence to be on air for 6 hours every day from April. I am always very much eager to meet people involved in media, as I believe media holds the power to initiate a 'bottom-up' process of change in a nation. I was overwhelmed to get myself introduced to the chairman and the director of the radio channel, both gentlemen in their fifties and both happen to be freedom fighters...who had left the very motherland they had liberated in '71....and had come to this country in mid 80s...to pursue a better life for themselves...and perhaps...to forget the pain of not being recognised...as 'muktijoddhas'...by their very countrymen. But my unplanned meeting with these accomplished men got all the more significance as it was on the eve of 'omor ekushey'....the international mother-tongue day...the day which upholds the glory of Bangla..as a language...to remember those who laid down their lives in 1952 against the unilateral imposition of Urdu as the state language of Pakistan. The time was right to speak my heart out to them, my plans, my aspirations, my complains...and to my sheer surprise, I discovered that the gentlement might be somewhat 25 years older than I am but they have the hearts of a 25 year old, burning with the same zeal, same energy and same dreams as they might have had when they ran through the paddy fields of Bengal with an LMG on their shoulders, or with which they had patiently waited to explode the enemy vehicles with previously implanted PEs ( in their terms)...or plastic explosives....i was so hopeful to have found some likeminded people who share a lot of similar views about the improvement of the nation.....so finally after a heated and informative 'adda' we headed towards the shaheed minar at Whitechapel to place flowers there at 12 am. I was so excited with the idea....thinking that never in my life have I ever gone to the shaheed minar at Dhaka to do what I was about to do miles away from home..for the first time in my life....I remember Papa and his friends used to go to the Dhaka shaheed minar early in the mornings to do 'Probhat Feri'...but myself...no. The park was filled with some 2000 slogan chanting, tunes singing Bengalis who braved the merciless London subzero temperature to express their gratitude to those who gave us the right to speak in Bangla...I was amazed to see senior citizens...apparently religious in nature...wearing beard and caps...with flowers in their hands....what a beautiful retort to the last year's objection of the nearby East London Mosque against placing flowers in shaheed minar...(they think its idolatry)...I also saw so many Sylhetis chanting the same slogans and sharing the same views as us...the non-sylhetis...after all...we are Bengalis...Bangladeshi Bengalis...from the start of the day to the end of it..it was quite an eye-opening experience for me....I learnt that I shouldn't generalise about people...also...that we still have hope...we have the scattered pockets of likeminded revolutionaries...just waiting to get integrated and bring forth another '71...this time for good.