Tuesday | 28 January 2025 | Reg No- 06
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Tuesday | 28 January 2025 | Epaper

DU English department, lawmen breaking the law, our bookshops

Published : Friday, 27 January, 2017 at 7:45 PM  Count : 303
The thirty-first annual get-together of the Department of English of Dhaka University as also the thirtieth founding anniversary of the English Department Alumni Society (EDAS), together with the ninety-fifth founding anniversary of the department, will get underway at the Teacher-Student Centre this afternoon. In the years since my classmates and I finished our honours and masters classes in the department, it has always been with fondness and a huge sense of nostalgia that we have remembered the way we were as young people. The alumni get-together is, therefore, one way of reconnecting with our past and recalling the varied literary experience we went through in the years between autumn 1975 and summer 1981.
You will have noticed that between 1975 and 1981, it is altogether six years we spent at DU in place of the normal four. The reason for those extra two years is plain, or should be. There were all the deferred classes caused by political and other issues, all of which led to what we came to refer to as session jams. It was a situation which left us disturbed to no end, for there were many among us (this scribe included) who, coming from a struggling middle class, needed to move out of university and into professions. Those two years --- and they were applicable to the students of other university departments as well --- were an impediment to our future in so many ways. Even so, there were the other aspects of university life as well that we truly enjoyed as students.
Not many among us in the Department of English were in the mood to stay away from classes, to play truant as it were. We were young, which meant that in us, as the boys observed and interacted with the girls of the department, something of the poetic stirred in all of us. For many, there was romance. There is the instance of two classmates falling in love with each other and getting married. There were others, boys particularly, who wrote poetry or talked poetry and fell head over heels in unilateral or one-sided love with the obscure objects of their desire but in the end were left watching, helplessly, the beautiful young women they dreamed of courting getting married to other, more 'established' men and moving on.
But surely the most enlightening aspect of our years in the department was the knowledge, the depth of it, we gained from all our teachers. Every time we had Professor Serajul Islam Choudhury step into the classroom and begin his lecture, all of us furiously began to note down everything he had to say. And everything from him meant literary information of substance. Professor Imtiaz Habib, of whom we were initially terrified because of his no-nonsense attitude in class, initiated us into Metaphysical Poetry. Professor Ahsanul Haque, who passed away recently, was a scholar in every sense of the meaning. One could go on naming one teacher after another. They made us what we are today.
The alumni coming-together this afternoon is, therefore, much more than a reunion. It is a tribute to our teachers, those who have aged and retired and those who have passed on.
***
What do you expect the general run of citizens to do on our clogged streets and roads when you see, right before you, men in uniform and therefore part of the formal structure of the State, violating traffic regulations with impunity? A few days ago, three policemen, clearly of officer rank, were spotted on the road between the Secretariat and the National Press Club sharing a single motorbike and crossing the road. None of them had a helmet on. Three men on a motorbike is an offence. Wearing no helmet is another. But who will take such enforcers of the law to task over their violation of the law?
As if that were not enough, a couple of days ago, a soldier --- and he was in uniform and riding a motorcycle, saw hardly anything wrong in speeding up directly from the road between Residential Model School and the old police thana, or station, in Mohammadpur, in his urgency to move toward Asad Gate. He should have taken a left turn, like everyone else does, as he emerged from that road, go all the way up and then turn right, before Ganobhaban, and go on to wherever he meant to go. He did not do that.
These are all men who wear uniforms that are symbolic of the State. There are other personifications of the republic who simply do not care about the wrong message they are sending out to citizens as they commit every infraction they can on our chaotic roads. The media, both print and electronic, have regularly posted images and news of vehicles carrying ministers, lawmakers, bureaucrats and police officers taking to the wrong side of the road with nary a thought to the offence they are committing. When they do that, they are 'emulated' by others. Among these others are journalists, many of whom believe they, like those representatives of the State, are above the law.
Now consider this:
You as a common citizen try to do something of the same or someone like you attempts to achieve a similar feat of violating road regulations. Can you imagine the consequences?
***
More avenues aimed at encouraging people to develop reading habits need to be opened in Bangladesh. And with that must come an inclination on the part of bookshop owners to sell books, especially those published abroad and written by people in other countries, at affordable prices for readers. That said, when you happen to be on a tour of the bookshops at Aziz Market in Shahbagh, you realize how the generations preceding ours, in the 1950s and 1960s --- were inextricably linked to reading. You cannot say the same today, for people buying books are few and far between these days. But the fact that Bengalis have always loved reading is an idea which gets reinforced in you when you visit the bookshops in Kolkata. It is a most healthy sight there, people straddling the region between teenage, youth, middle age and old age, all looking for books at places like Oxford Bookshop on Park Street.
In West Bengal, they are all Bengalis just as we in Bangladesh are. They read more than we do, write more than we do. That is a powerful reason why we in Bangladesh should be going for a revival of interest in books and reading. Hope has been kindled in us through such bookstores as Batighar in Chittagong and the new Pathak Shamabesh complex at Shahbagh here in Dhaka. Aziz Market, along with the traditional bookshops at New Market, is there. At the old airport in Tejgaon, The Bookworm offers a rich variety of books any bibliophile would like to have his hands on.
There used to be small bookshops in the Bijoynagar area where precious copies of second or even third-hand books were available. Not any more, for the shops have disappeared and other business establishments, in line with the crass commercialization of these times, have come up. In the early 1970s, soon after Liberation, old books were sold on the pavement in Gulistan, on the road that is today Bangabandhu Avenue. On the pavement leading from the TSC to the Public Library, you sometimes come across some good old books, both in Bengali and English, but of late the number of works in English has been depleting. That is sad.
Bishwa Shahitya Kendra has a mobile library, the only one of its kind in the country, which is encouraging. But perhaps the Kendra could think of opening some new outlets in the capital as well as outside it and make it easier for people to read? At Bangla Academy, the book sales centre is a readers' delight. Something of the same can be said about the two outlets Prothoma Publications has, at the offices of Prothom Alo and at Aziz Market. The online newspaper bdnews24.com too has its book publication sector which should focus on an expansion in the times ahead.
The bottom line? Let us read more. And we can do that if we have more of bookshops and libraries around us. Ever noticed how starved for books our citizens in the rural regions are?
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Associate Editor, The Daily Observer






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