As I looked at a picture of the storm that struck the Philippines the other day, my mind suddenly flashed back to the 1985 Urir Char Cyclone. It was a rainy day with gusty winds in the capital and Bangladesh was bracing for a major storm. On that day, like all other reporters, I too had to cut short my regular chatting with friends at the press club and head back to office.
Developed in the central Bay of Bengal, the storm with hurricane intensity was already heading our way and it was expected to strike Bangladesh anytime in the evening. So, most of the journalists especially reporters and photographers left the club much earlier that day and rushed back to their media outlets in Dhaka for covering the ominous news of a deadly storm.
And as expected, the storm struck Bangladesh almost at the same time of the night as the Titanic sank into the North Atlantic Ocean some 109 years ago. But the Bangladesh tragedy was equivalent to multiple Titanic disasters in terms of loss of life. The severe cyclonic storm devastated a large swath of Bangladesh's coastal areas wiping out virtually an entire island called Urir Char.
Packing winds up to 154 kilometres per hour and surges as high as 15 feet, the deadly tropical storm struck Bangladesh shortly before midnight on May 24 in 1985 killing an estimated 11,069 people and damaging 94,379 houses. The island of Urir Char which emerged in the Bay of Bengalin 1970 disappeared under the water. Storm surges rising up to 4.6 meters completely swallowed the island.
As I stepped into the newsroom of the New Nation, then a well-respected and top-class English-language national daily published by the largest media house of Bangladesh, I found our entire team of reporters already working on the story of the storm. As the violent storm, powered by strong winds and surges, struck the coastal belt of Bangladesh, the speed of our collective work in the newsroom in Dhaka, 157 kilometres from Urir Char, reached a frantic level.
The storm turned our newsroom into a kind of war room. We felt like we were dealing with powerful enemy forces. On that night at the New Nation, we were collecting storm information simultaneously in three different ways: by compiling correspondents' reports, making phone calls to officials and monitoring mass media. Around 2:00 am on May 25, we produced the final version of the report on storm and handed it to the news editor along with a series of storm-related side stories.
As we all worked on various stories of storm, our news editor was literally sweating. He was drinking water frequently that night and shuttling from one reporter's desk to another inquiring about the progress of our work. And we all had a common response: "almost done." Around 2 o'clock on Saturday morning, almost all the typewriters in the New Nation newsroom became silent. As our job ended, the printing department's folks rolled up their sleeves to bring out a very important issue of the paper well before dawn in a timely fashion.
After we wrapped up our work of a busy news night, we all breathed a collective sigh of relief across the New Nation newsroom which suddenly turned into a very quiet and peaceful place. I put my small Brother Deluxe typewriter into the drawer of my desk and then joined my two very friendly colleagues -- Shamsuddin Ahmed and Matiur Rahman. We relaxed for a short while after experiencing one kind of storm right through our newsroom in Dhaka for several hours. We all were literally exhausted after non-stop work from the early evening of May 24 through the early hours of May 25.
At one point, Matiur Rahman asked: "I am really feeling very hungry. Is there any restaurant open in Dhaka at this time?" "Yes, one restaurant -the Star Hotel in Old Dhaka -- is still open," replied Shamsuddin Ahmed who used to live in that area of the city. We didn't waste any more time in the newsroom. We came out of the building, rented an auto rickshaw on Ramkrishna Mission Road outside the Ittefaque Bhavan and headed to the Star Hotel. As we reached there at about 3:00 a.m. on Saturday, the tunnel-shaped restaurant was still full of customers.
We ordered our food which was quickly served and ate together amid casual conversations. After finishing our totally unexpected second round of dinner that night, we also drank tea together at the restaurant and spent there about an hour. Then we parted ways with a heavy heart for the devastating storm that just struck the coastal areas of Bangladesh. As I stepped into our Naya Paltan house in the city centre, I heard the call coming from the nearby Baitul Mukarram Grand Mosque for the early Morning Prayer.
About a week after the Urir Char Cyclone, I was chatting with my journalist friends at the National Press Club finishing my lunch. Around mid-afternoon, the club receptionist informed me that a gentleman was waiting in the reception area to see me. As I came out, a man in a suit and tie shook my hand and smiled. He looked like he breathed a huge sigh of relief. "My name is Major Qureshi. I am the chairman of Bangladesh Red Cross. I am looking for you. I called your newspaper office and somebody told me that you might be at the press club at this time," he said, adding: "I am so glad that I have found you here."
When I asked him why he was looking for me, he said he received a message from the Geneva Headquarters of the League of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies with an instruction to immediately contact me for an article on the aftermath of the Urir Char Cyclone and then he showed me the message. "We like to commission an article from Syed Badiuzzaman, senior reporter of the New Nation newspaper, on the aftermath of the Urir Char Cyclone for publication in European press to raise fund for the relief and rehabilitation of the cyclone victims in Bangladesh," read the message.
Sent by Anne Naaf, the information officer at the Geneva office of the Red Cross, the message further said that the article should be written in Time/Newsweek style; the length of the article should be approximately 1,200 words and it must be submitted within 72 hours. The message also requested for a dozen high-quality photographs of the cyclone devastation. Being a professional journalist, I had no reason to reject such an amazing request. In fact, that's what we do as reporters. "It's done; you can go home now," I assured Major Qureshi. After receiving my assurance, he happily exited the club and I entered back to re-join my friends.
The Red Cross request came to me totally unexpectedly. So, I was curious to know how I was chosen--among so many journalists of Bangladesh -directly by its Geneva office for writing the article on the aftermath of the Urir Char Cyclone in Bangladesh. I was really quite puzzled because I never contacted the Geneva office of the Red Cross for undertaking any writing assignment for them. So, I asked Major Qureshi if he had any clue as to how I was selected by the Red Cross for this task. But Qureshi too said he was totally clueless as the Red Cross office in Geneva never consulted him on this matter.
To put an end to this puzzle, Major Qureshi called Red Cross Information Officer Anne Naaf in Geneva from his Dhaka office in my presence and I asked her how they found me as I was never in any kind of contact with them. Anne said that they had contacted the London Observer and asked them if the Observer had any correspondent in Bangladesh who could write an excellent article on the impact of the devastating Urir Char Cyclone. "The London Observer then recommended you for this assignment," Anne Naaf told me from her office in Geneva.
At this point, everything became clear. About a year ago (1984), I went to London to participate in a journalism fellowship sponsored by the Commonwealth Press Union. There I contacted the foreign editor of the London Observer expressing my interest in becoming a stringer for them in Dhaka. In response, the foreign editor wrote me a two-sentence letter to my Central London address: "We do have somebody in Dhaka but he hasn't been active for some time. So, we will also put you on call just in case we need anything from Bangladesh."
The puzzle was finally solved. Anyway, I completed my writing assignment as per their guidelines and submitted it to Major Qureshi well ahead of the deadline. With the article, I also submitted about a dozen photos of the cyclone devastation supplied by New Nation photographer Pavel Rahman who just returned from the affected areas. It was one of the best professional assignments of my entire journalism career as it gave me an excellent opportunity to showcase my journalistic skills to an international organization and serve the people of my country at a time when they needed our service urgently for their relief and rehabilitation.
A couple of weeks later, I got a nice letter from the Red Cross Information Officer Anne Naaf who thanked me "warmly" for what she described as "an excellent article." After another major storm which also caused large-scale devastation in Bangladesh before I came to the U.S. in 1988 for working as a visiting journalist at an American newspaper and studying journalism at Northeastern University in Boston, the Geneva office of the Red Cross re-assigned me for another similar article.
The writer is a Toronto-based journalist who also writes for the Toronto
Sun as a guest columnist
