Editorial
Mayhem at Rajshahi University
What took place at Rajshahi University on Sunday is scandal pure and simple for the country. With the student followers of the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party going on a rampage and with hardly any action on the part of the law enforcers to stop them from doing what they were cheerfully doing, we may have reached yet one more of those dark phases in life we continually speak about. But of course it is not the end of the world. The lesson of civilisation is that life and beauty always spring from the ashes signifying the past. That would be a philosophical way of looking at what has been happening at Rajshahi University. But in a country where negatives systematically outweigh the positives, it is indeed hard to hold on to philosophy, especially in conditions where the young quite clearly hold matters to ransom. But look again. The fracas at RU was clearly caused by all this matter of the naming of a new panel for the appointment of a new vice chancellor. The JCD activists, as we understand, went into that black mood because of their belief that a pro-Jamaat panel had been forged, meaning that their own favourite academics had been ignored in the process.
The result was pure chaos. The students wing of the BNP then went angrily into the wicked job of ransacking as many as fifty five rooms of the university. It appears that not a single room, all belonging to the teachers of the various departments of the university, was spared. Add to that the injuries to three teachers and a number of students. In effect, what occurred at RU on Sunday was violence of an unprecedented kind. It is one thing for general students to flee such scenes of disturbance out of fear. It is quite another for teachers forced to run for their lives. The ugly scenes of the rampaging young men looking for property to destroy and individuals to humiliate have come through palpably in the media. It is an image which shames us all. More importantly, it leaves the government in a bad spot, not only because such a situation could come to pass but also because it was a condition brought about by its own young adherents. It now remains for the government, therefore, to go for some serious damage control. We will expect the powers that be to go swiftly into the task of detecting those responsible for the mayhem and eventually penalising them severely. It will not do, however, to nab a few young men here and there and inform the country that they have been expelled from the students’ wing of the ruling party. What matters is the need to spot the individuals who might have influenced or provoked these young into such destructive behaviour. It ought not to be forgotten that the ugly incidents at Rajshahi University are not simply a matter of partisan politics being played out on a smaller but nevertheless insidious scale. It is a condition which has only added more of a dark patch to an already bad situation.
Perhaps it will be too much to ask, given the record, that decisive action be taken against the troublemakers. But we do demand action anyway. And let us add that an inquiry into the roles played by individuals (and that may include some teachers at RU) is here called for.
Tony Blair’s politics
Tony Blair will certainly go down in British history as the man who redefined the Labour Party. On 5 May, as all projections show and as logic dictates, he will lead the party to its third straight electoral victory. In doing that, he will be repeating what Margaret Thatcher did with her Conservatives between 1979 and 1990. In a way, both Thatcher and Blair have given a new shape, separately of course, to modern politics in Britain. Both have been forceful individuals in the matter of reshaping politics around their personalities, which has by and large meant that they have generally had their eyes on history. The trouble with being focused on history, though, is that much of the substance that should be in politics gets lost in the process.
Now, there are a lot of people out there who have, while crediting Blair with reinventing Labour (it is now called New Labour), also spotted in him terrible flaws of political character. He has generally been perceived to be a politician who has lacked the depth necessary in men of conviction. His style remains that of the schoolboy determined to impress the audience in a debate. His endless smiles have largely been taken for cynicism. Overall, his government has been a special focus of criticism because of the spin he and his friends have constantly put to it. Finally, there are the serious people who have seen in the British leader streaks of presidential demeanour in that the idea of collective or cabinet government has not been much of a part of his style. Be that as it may, Tony Blair has also been, since he first became leader of the party eleven years ago, Labour’s biggest asset in a very long time. After people like Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, he has been the one man realistic enough to know that the party needed more of practical, down-to-earth wisdom than old-fashioned idealism. That increased the number of his enemies. But he did make Labour electable eighteen years after it began wandering in the woods. He may not have made much of a difference intellectually, certainly not in the way Churchill and Harold Wilson did. But he did stamp his own personality, however tentatively, on the country.
All said and done, though, when Tony Blair wins again next month, he ought to remember something called voter fatigue. People, being only human, look for change. And change is what they might see in Gordon Brown.
Humour in the life of the Bengali
Humour is very largely a matter of erudition. You could even say that it is an acquired attitude, one which happens to be there specifically because of its owner’s ability to relate to worldly experience around him. The venerable Obaidul Haq, journalist and, more importantly, one of our foremost opinion makers, remains in his nineties an epitome of remarkable intellect and boundless humour,
writes Syed Badrul Ahsan
For a very long time now, and we are here speaking in terms of decades if not centuries, humour has been missing in the life of the Bengali. It really does not matter how you look at it or where you go looking for humour, in Bangladesh or West Bengal. Those of us who speak Bangla have perennially suffered from the recurring ailment called seriousness or severity of expression. That is a sign of bad health. A society that opens itself up to humour, as it were, or makes self-deprecating jokes is the one that is most likely to come level with the rest of the world. Now, if you go observing the world of Bengali politics, you are quite likely to come away with a bloody nose. No, you would not be getting into a fracas. It is just that as an observer you would likely find yourself caught between two groups of politicians for whom bush wars or urban guerrilla activities happen to be the only business of life they are aware of. And yet it was not always like this.
Back in the old days, Shere Bangla AK Fazlul Haq was noted for the lightness that he often brought rather deftly into his politics. Mind you, he was as serious a politician as any (if you excuse the many fluctuations in political philosophy he went through between the 1930s and 1950s). But there was in him that human element, that quality of making light of the most sombre occasion to enable people to move closer to him. Much of the same defined the personality of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. He had a capacity for humour that has not quite been rivalled in this part of the world since his assassination. On a bigger scale, if you recall the 1960s, a very turbulent period in our lives, you may have cause to remember that despite the fraught nature of politics, men who made politics their business easily mingled with one another. And that was how you had as disparate individuals as Moulana Bhashani, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Shah Azizur Rahman, Hamidul Haq Chowdhury, Fazlul Quader Chowdhury, Moshiur Rahman Jadu Mia and Moulvi Farid Ahmed interacting in a mutually respectful way with one another. They made good-natured banter a part of their conversation, even if they did not forget the fundamental differences that kept them apart.
And if politics today has turned into a form of insipidity because of a nearly total absence of lightness and humour in it (you only have to hear those lawmakers in Parliament raise all those weighty issues and try to convince us, through their fiery elocution, that it is a silly man who has time or place for humour in his life), what about the other areas of life we are of necessity part of? Our newspapers, both in Bangla and English, regularly inform us, in so many turns of phrase, that news gathering and dissemination is serious business, which indeed it is. But there is always considerable scope for editorial writers and columnists to argue, through their words, that certain issues can be dealt with in a way that makes people chuckle, and perhaps guffaw. But, of course, you could try convincing yours truly that there are far too many social and political ailments in Bengali life to allow people time for an indulgence of humour. You could be quite right, up to a point. If you take off from that point, you would be surprised to know that humour has largely and paradoxically been a product of the circumstances of impoverishment. No society thriving in affluence has ever served as fertile ground for humour. People joked and laughed even as they made their way to the Bastille in 1789. Enthusiasts for Pakistan in the angry summer of 1947 were offended not at all by the various parodies their political slogans were being reduced to (note ‘sar pe topi munh me paan larhke lenge Pakistan). In 1971, as we cheerfully and very logically went into the business of cutting that very Pakistan to size, we did not forget to laugh and enjoy as we did so. M.R. Akhtar Mukul’s ‘Charampatra’ on Shwadhin Bangla Betar was a fine instance of raw, rugged Bengali humour at work in the darkening gloom of genocidal times in this country.
But look at the newspapers again. It is not merely news people or editorial writers who have lost that deft touch of humour. With the large community of columnists we have all over the country, you would have thought that at least a handful of them would deign to give us something to make us roll over with laughter once or twice a week. No, that is not the way it happens. Even our cartoons these days fail to evoke smiles on our faces. As for our columnists, they are almost all of them too busy dealing with the Middle East, the war on terror, Iraq and what not to have any time even for a wry way of inspecting the world around them. A society that has no time or has little talent for laughter has a very short span of life. That is something M. N. Mustafa, he of the radio background, understood quite well. His humour columns in the newspapers (remember the piece he once produced on the nature and myriad uses of the bamboo?) set the day off to a bright start for many. In our more staid times, there are of course intellectually inclined figures who it is sheer charm to listen to. It is easy to remember the points Abdullah Abu Sayeed makes in any conversation because he values the worth of humour and uses it in liberal doses. A very remarkable sense of humour, that sophisticated ability to evoke laughter, defines the personality of Syed Ashraf Ali, who at this point keeps the standard of the Islamic Foundation fluttering. In Syed Najmuddin Hashim, humour came in warm, rather frothy form. It was a struggle wrenching oneself away from a conversation with him. With Shaukat Osman, every dialogue was a matter of coming up against his self-deprecating nature. And then, his limericks were always there for you. And there are of course our deeply respectable A.Z. Panna at the News Today and Mashuqul Haq at the Bangladesh Observer who have brought alongside their pursuit of serious journalism whole bagfuls of humour in their conversations. And Azizur Rashid Babu, he of the Daily Star? You will not know humour until you share a cup of tea with him. Take an afternoon off to be with any one of them. You will have learned in that one sitting lessons that you could not have learned in months.
But humour, the use or application of it, is a direct offshoot of reading and indulging in all those activities that allow the individual to observe the world from a height. That is how people like Ranan Lurie work. A sense of detachment must come to the man or woman who wishes to have people smile and laugh through their gloom. Hanif Sanket will be remembered for a very long time because he has been able, on television, to tap into our capacity for laughter. We would not have heard of him had it not been for Fazle Lohani, whose informal, relaxed manner on television was one of the earliest hints of how entertainment could be made, well, really and truly entertaining. While you mull over that, you ought to be saying a hearty ‘thank you’ to Humayun Ahmed for the tales of the middle class, with all its problems, smallnesses and humour he has been able to project in his fiction and his television plays. The hilarity that was once part of Amjad Hossain’s television drama every time Eid came round is a thing of the past. Such an approach to literature and drama is, sadly, yet a missing factor in the nation’s cinema. When was the last time you watched a humour movie, or one with an instructive sub-plot of humour in it, in this country?
Humour is very largely a matter of erudition. You could even say that it is an acquired attitude, one which happens to be there specifically because of its owner’s ability to relate to worldly experience around him. The venerable Obaidul Haq, journalist and, more importantly, one of our foremost opinion makers, remains in his nineties an epitome of remarkable intellect and boundless humour. You see, humour comes to people willing not to be presumptuous and pompous. But that pomposity and that presumptuousness are what you spot in our offices, educational institutions and business organisations. The bureaucrat is rare who will do a good job even as he brightens up his office with humour. It is when you make everyone smile or laugh through your wit, through the ticklish nature in you, that you get some of the best results.
Mian Abdul Hamid, for a very long time teacher of Bangla at Notre Dame College, remains one of the icons of our academic world for many in this country. His understanding of life, together with the ceaseless doses of humour he brought into his deliberations on literature, promised some of the most exquisite mornings of gold digging for his students. He was a martinet. But he tempered discipline, indeed transformed it into an occasion devoutly to be desired, with a peppering of his lectures with slices of humour from life as it was around him and his pupils. In his classes, every eye twinkled in excitement, in palpable delight.
E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk
(Talleyrand is away)
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