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Finance Minister Saifur Rahman has for months felt uncomfortable with the way the media have been working in Bangladesh. He has now reached the ultimate in an expression of umbrage through describing the media as the country’s worst enemy. That is a sweeping statement and one wishes the minister had considered the implications of his remarks before coming forth with them. The minister is upset that the media have not focused on the progress which he thinks the country has made ‘in all fields compared to other South Asian countries’. He thinks that only the bad things are reflected in the reports and comments made by the media. The point here is a simple one: while the minister believes that the media have been doing a job detrimental to the interest of the nation, the media have by and large projected an image of reality as it has constantly shaped itself before the country. In a very important way, even Saifur Rahman has agreed with the media. Only recently he lashed out at all the departments and ministries of the government through referring to the corruption that infests all of these places. Are we now expected to believe that the minister did not mean what he said then?
   On a bigger level, it makes little sense for Saifur Rahman or for that matter any minister to expect the media to do their job in line with the specifications set out by the powers that be. All too often, governments in this country have exhorted the media to engage in objective reporting of the issues. That exhortation has in a number of instances been interpreted to mean news reporting and comment that will project the authorities in good light. The media have been right to ignore such exhortations and instead go on with their own, globally accepted standards of reporting. As to the ministerial criticism of the media always focusing on bad things, we would like to inform Saifur Rahman and everyone else who thinks like him that in this country it has generally been the bad that has outweighed the good. Let a few instances of ‘bad reporting’ be cited here, those that the minister would like the media to stay away from. The media have in recent times focused on the shame that has been the presidential pardon granted to a murder convict only because the man happens to be linked to the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Should the media have suppressed that news? In the last many weeks, the media have reported on the perceived corruption involved in the gift of a car by Niko to a now removed minister of state. Was that a bad thing to do? The endless persecution of the small Ahmadiyya community by a handful of people who should have been brought to heel was correctly projected by the media. In what way can that be an inimical act on the part of the media towards the state? The authorities have shockingly been unable to solve any of the major politics-related crimes perpetrated over the last year and a half and yet the minister thinks the media focus on them amounts to bad reporting. There are businessmen and business houses that have grabbed land that is not theirs. The media have reported on them. The media have reported as well on the rise in the prices of commodities together with the denial of such realities by the prime minister and the commerce minister. Should the media now inform the country that there is nothing wrong with the market? That the said price increases are a travesty of truth?
   At the risk of sounding complacent, we choose to stress the point that Bangladesh’s media have been doing a splendid job of keeping people on the higher perches of authority on their toes. The fact that ministers and other politicians periodically tend to get upset at the workings of the newspapers is proof of the good work the latter have been doing. As for Saifur Rahman’s unwise remark that the media are Bangladesh’s worst enemy, we will only let the minister know that no one, not even a minister, has a monopoly on patriotism.

The heart, soft and fiery

The paths of true love never did run smooth. It was something William Shakespeare said hundreds of years ago. But even if he had not said them, the difficulties that lovers have over millennia gone through would have been just as bad. And when the issue is one of one-sided love, or call it infatuation, the problems are that much worse. Think of all the trouble that occurred recently over a youth’s feelings for a girl aged thirteen at Christian Palli in Barisal. Like any young man unable to be accepted by young women, seventeen year-old Apu stumbled on the idea that teasing and then proposing marriage to Tumpa (she is the girl in the picture) would lead to a fulfilment of ambition. Well, in this particular case it did not.
   Tumpa’s guardians complained about what they saw as crudity on Apu’s part. The young man’s friends then swooped on one of the complainants and badly left him wounded. From that point on it was only a short step away from the police station, where a complaint was duly filed. The police then arrested a young man who also happens to be a local Jubo Dal leader. The whole sordid episode ought to have ended there. It did not. The friends of Apu and Monir (he is the Jubo Dal man) took that as supreme humiliation and simply went about setting fire to a number of shops in the Christian Palli. That was certainly not a nice thing to do. But what you see here is a huge confusing tangle of realities. What began as love soon dwindled into harassment followed by a subtle entry of politics. The consequences were bound to be what they turned out to be.
   Ah, the heart! It can be so soft and mellifluous. And yet, at not being taken seriously, it can cause huge fires all around.

When you remember the times in which Rahman brought, somewhat, verve into your life through his movies, you tend to go back to the years that are now behind you. It is something which keeps happening to us, all of us. Every time someone who climbed the ladder to fame in the past passes on, into the region beyond death, we tell ourselves yet once more that a bit more of the fleeting and the beautiful has gone before us. It is almost as if we have lost faith in our present. It is certainly a reflection of how pessimistic we are about the future. Whatever used to be is what we live by. Keep focusing on movies and you will find that in your particular Bengali world, it is always Uttam Kumar and his generation who go on influencing your thoughts. Rahman belonged to that generation. It was a generation with character. There was suavity, there was urbanity and, overall, there was a civilized ambience in people who were part of that generation. And not just in the world of movies.
   You might wish to take a peek at the politics of the past, of the 1960s. Now, in terms of what we in this country have gone through, there were surely a whole lot of things which went wrong in the times that coincided with those of Uttam and Rahman. That was because of Ayub Khan, because of predators like him. Even so, you cannot but acknowledge a very poignant reality, which is that politicians in that era knew what politics was all about. They could argue over the issues, they could mobilize the masses in their support. At the end of the day, though, they never forgot to be civil to one another. Men like Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Hamidul Haq Chowdhury, Mahmud Ali, Fazlul Quader Chowdhury, Nurul Amin and Moulvi Farid Ahmed never strayed from etiquette. They laughed, they bantered and they shared jokes, all away from the ideologies or principles they upheld in public. You do not come by such camaraderie, such professionalism in politics any more, in this country. Sit back a little and ask yourself if you are not actually inhabiting a strange world where Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina really do not have the time or the inclination to speak to each other. Throughout the seasons you come by all those enduring images of political leaders in the West, in India, all with resolutely opposing views about the quality of leadership, sharing ideas with one another. The British prime minister and the leader of the opposition converse and laugh as they walk together to the opening of Parliament. The president of the United States and the man he has just defeated in the race for the White House do not hold anything against each other. Atal Behari Vajpayee and Sonia Gandhi greet each other with folded hands. You marvel at such wonderful manifestations of human behaviour. When your mind switches back to the objective reality in your own courtyard, though, you realize how poorly off you are in terms of the world outside your door.
   No, the past was not perfect. But in the past there was such a thing as shame, the fear of social stigma in people who had indulged in some corruption or other. We do not come across such people any more. The finance minister tells you that every ministry and every department in the country teems with corrupt people. There are assistant secretaries around you who have bought cars and flats. A low level officer at customs has been building apartment complexes for years on end. When the driver of the CNG scooter you are on tells you, with positive pride all over his face, that the owner of his vehicle is an engineer who has two other scooters and twenty five trucks and is not yet forty years old, you think you know how much that engineer must have stolen or extracted from people. Try making your way sometimes to places like Kalabagan and Kathalbagan in the nation’s capital. Do the narrow roads and alleys there speak of something? You will, if you reflect awhile, stumble upon the answer. Most of the men in these localities, when they built their homes, went into a spirit of things competitive to appropriate as much of public land as possible for themselves. That is where you see a shameful past. These men, now old or dead, always kept quiet about their misdeeds. But those who are corrupt in your times have never flinched from flaunting their stolen property. The powerful businessmen who keep advising politicians on how to run the country have in their midst some very rotten apples, those who have stealthily taken over land not theirs. If there were justice in your country, if the fear of God kept men from sin, you and I would be flogging these scoundrels today. Ah, but that is our misfortune, this knowledge that we really cannot shame these thieves in our society. And all the time they keep shaming our country, our history, before the world.
   There were values that our parents instilled in us in the past. Principles mattered. The pain of our neighbour was our pain. The agony of the country was something we were expected to handle in order for life to be made better, more spacious. You do not find these values around you any more. Ministers hand over government land to their relatives at throwaway prices, artistes with terrible voices belt out songs that leave your ears aching for weeks and education officials find nothing wrong in squandering public money on jaunts abroad. Do you see the depths to which we have sunk? When your government decides that a diplomat has been doing a bad job and must be brought back home, the friends of the diplomat put up a fight abroad and demand that he be kept on. Do you observe what has been happening here, and everywhere? The mob has taken over. Angry politicians march to the courts, their sycophants and hangers-on in tow, to demand that newspaper editors be taken to jail. The minister of state for civil aviation watches all those aircraft destroying themselves and then goes to bed, where sleep does not come. And yet he will not tell the prime minister that he has failed to do his job and so needs to go.
   Rahman was part of an age when we felt pretty good about ourselves and with ourselves. He was our idol. The romance he symbolized on the screen is what we tried to live through our youth. Look around. You will perhaps be appalled at all that wasteland out there today. There are no heroes. And all the heroines have opted for hip-swinging and cleavage expositions. You panic, and rush your little children into their rooms.
   Our present is dried earth. The future will have sands blowing all across an ugly terrain.
   E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk