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Men, ideas, and eras long gone
There is a cosmopolitan mind at work in the essays here. For a number of years, indeed decades, Mizanur Rahman Shelley has been a vibrant presence, in a very intellectual sense, in the country. He has been an academic; he has gone through a goodly phase as a member of the Civil Service of Pakistan (obviously prior to 1971) and he has been, briefly as a minister, one of the policy makers in the Bangladesh political administration. Beyond and above all that, Shelley has been a writer, a commentator on men and events as he has observed around him. The Windmills of Your Mind is but a slight peek into the way he has dealt with the world.
One could possibly raise the question of whether articles written over a period of years in various journals and newspapers can really have much of an appeal in rapidly changing times. But that is precisely the point. A fundamental aspect of collected articles, which this book is, is that they throw light on the writer as he has evolved over the years. It is thus that the write-up on Mahiuddin Mahmud Hafiz (he died young in 1968) comes with a poignancy of its own. Hafiz, like the writer, was part of the civil service, seemed destined to go a long way, until tetanus claimed him. He was sub-divisional officer, Madaripur, when the end came. When Shelley writes about friends and acquaintances who have passed into the ages, he does so with feeling. But with feeling comes a convincing ability to record the minute details, the attributes as it were, of the individuals being spoken of. That is the way things happen when he writes about Syed Mahbub Murshed, of whom he relates tales young men and women in these times know precious little about. Or is it a fact that Shelley’s generation remains intellectually superior to the one that came after it?
Let the answer shape itself however it may. The bigger truth one glimpses through the essays here is the aesthetic qualities that have over the decades shaped the imagination of the writer. His reflections on love are those that with a degree of suddenness compel readers into recalling the pristine qualities that have always been associated with the heart. And where the heart has its day in the sun, it is the mind that takes over. Read the piece, written with tender seriousness, on the life and times of Niccolo Machiavelli. Speaking of things tender, Shelley’s thoughts on such celluloid legends as Dilip Kumar and Audrey Hepburn are a travel back through time. The implications are obvious. Dilip and Hepburn spring from an era where the goal was an attainment of the best. It is too bad that people in these less exciting times do not comprehend the nature of what has gone by. When the young do not recognize Hepburn here in Dhaka, much less reflect on her fame, it is not surprising. Mediocrity is all that matters and, with that, a horrific absence of a sense of inquiry. Shelley’s capacity to observe happenings and then shape his own responses to them is what comes through in the work. He refuses to remain happy with a mere narration of things, which in itself is a powerful sign of a mind refusing to take things for granted. He is not opinionated, but he certainly holds definitive opinions in areas he feels strongly about, the movie ‘Gandhi’ for instance. The belittling, as he sees it, of Suhrawardy in the Attenborough story is appalling for him. He will argue with you why it was wrong to cast the man in such poor light. Disagree with him, but you cannot quite convince him his feelings are misplaced.
The Windmills is not a landscape of ideas, in that very philosophical sense of the meaning. But it is surely a broad canvas on which Shelley brings into focus his thoughts on such varied themes as democracy in post-colonial societies, the laws of nature, rural poverty, et al. The constant whirring of his mind is what you hear as you juxtapose his thoughts on global food security with his notions of disarmament. The lucidity in the expression of thought is what takes the reader by pleasant surprise. The loneliness of elderly parents, the growing disconnect between ageing couples here in Bangladesh alert you to the changing nature of society. Memories of teachers, in the mould of Professor Noman, bring alive an era that produced a whole tranche of the finest men and women in Bengali society. But note that in more ways than one Shelley’s reflections could well provide the perfect backdrop to sadness. The sadness is in knowing that the individuals and ideas he dwells on have all passed on. We inhabit less exciting and therefore, in the intellectual sense, less challenging times. The twilight of the twentieth century for Bangladesh, writes Shelley in his moving piece on Professor Abdur Razzaq, came in the colours of profound sadness. The sentinels of the century, he goes on, are passing away one by one.
The century too has passed on. But this work remains an arrow pointed at the creative moments that once defined life for us.
— Syed Badrul Ahsan
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