Ekushe (the twenty-first): part 1

As part of a generation who didn't exist in 1952, 21st February has always been mystical. A band of young students voicing their society's rebellion against the forced enforcement of a language as the national language seemed surreal. In Presidency College, Calcutta, I used to participate in different writing programmes held on this date every year. But, the very fact of being in 2002/3/4 made the history of the date distant; yet, the idea created unfathomable bubbles in the mind then. It continued to do so for a long time.

Limbs like me? Volatile? Ignited ? Lamp by the cauldron that caught fire perhaps.

The fear of anything that doesn't conform to the mass has besieged the human mind for as  long back as history goes. In September, 1947 (Bangladesh was then East Pakistan) a booklet was published by a cultural society debating which language should become the state language of Pakistan - Bengali or Urdu. The opinion that Bengali remain a state language along with Urdu was not bizarre and irrational. With the overwhelming population in East Bangladesh (54 percent) being Bengali, it was not only a just demand but also a rational one.

The issue of language however never is an issue of language after all.Mohammad Ali Jinnah gave a speech at the Dhaka University Karjon Hall on March 4, 1948. It was on occasion of the convocation ceremony at the University. While Jinnah conceded the "right of the people of this province to choose Bengali as their official language if they so wished", he clearly stated that, "(t)here can be only one State language, if the component parts of this State are to march forward in unison, and that language, ..., can only be Urdu" (Ref). This was not the voice of the "friend" he claimed to be at the beginning of his speech. What could have been an innovative constitutional change instead became a political struggle in its own right.

Afraid of words I and you are. Scared to death that death will come. Words'll bring them?

On February 20, 1952, a day before organised student groups and political activists had called for a general strike, an order banning processions and meetings in Dhaka City came to force under Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code.This was now an expression of political might and repression. On February 21, 1952, students meet at the Dhaka University premises to defy Section 144. And then what happened is not only unfortunate but inhumane.  

Put on that armour of pride and kill. It takes time to throttle lungs. Fire is pure. Rain!
 
The events of February 1952 was carried forward in spirit as Bangladesh fought its independence battle against Pakistan. Within a year less than two decades, Bangladesh won its independence.

It was long after the writing programmes at Presidency College on February 21st, that I came to know that in 1954 Pakistan recognised Bangla as a state language.  

Now you have a voice, so be quiet. Now you have a voice, I beg you, speak. Now, you have a voice, don't think of  rains any more.


Note:
To know about the timeline of the Bangla Language Movement, come here.

Itlaicised lines are parts of a poem I am working on. 

Being Unsafe

safe/unsafe

I try a bit of free writing and I scribble the following after I type "unsafe" at the top of the page :

girl child.
freedom.

chocolate.

After much rumination, I fail to identify any continuity of thought. Still, I attempt to weave the stream.

The One Billion and Rising campaign, vindicating the right of safety of women, had just reached its media pinnacle on February 14th. And yet, I can not stop thinking of the violence and the oppression that the female foetus, the female child, the woman face in regions where this urbanised campaign is not even a dream. There is actually a multitude of worlds within this earth and this time; we do not need to go far out into the universe to look for multiverse. They are already here.

Freedom has been the tale of Schrödinger's cat experiment with a difference. Though you and I believe we can either have freedom, or not. In reality, freedom is the 'AND' syndrome. We have freedom to do many things, and, simultaneously, we do not have the freedom to those exact same things. We have the freedom to speak our mind, and, simultaneously, we do not have the freedom to speak our mind because too much is at stake already. 

For the chocolate, I think: irony. 

The free writing helps me to get to the point where I can look back at my beautiful flower-capered blog Lustrous Lives and realise how unsafe my writing dream would be if I were to cling on to the safe haven. 

When I started Lustrous Lives, I had arrived in Budapest with the baggage of having failed in life. I had left my M.Phil dissertation halfway and had killed the dream of being an English professor, possibly forever. Academics was my holy grail. It was the driving force in my life. And then, it was all gone. Lustrous Lives began as an escape from the ordeal and ended up being the salvation.

I wrote free-willingly about anything and everything that came to my mind. It was a time-killing exercise. And I willed to remember and record only the happy memories and the beautiful thoughts. It was a sane choice at that point in time. I survived the pangs of being an utter failure. That blog gave me all the safety principles that helped me to combat the new life in a new continent. It gave me family, love and support. It also gave me something that I wasn't looking for. I found a new dream. 

The dream appeared to be an illusion for some time and I believed that it was only a mirage. It gradually started to make me leap out of my sleep at regular intervals causing an itching that will only be satisfied by writing. I was still seeped in self-doubt. Questions loomed over my dream: What kind of a writer will I be? How can I write anything that will make any contribution to all the great works that have already been written? 

I always looked at the macrocosmic view and as a result, was left more and more inconfident. How infinitesimally small I am! - is all that I could think of. What had been my safe haven started becoming an unsafe zone to tread on.The more I wrote, the more I believed it is of no use to follow this new dream. 

Then there are leaps that we make for no logical reason at all. I have finally decided to follow the dream that has been haunting me. 

It is unsafe to dream because you have the probability of waking up from the dream into the real world. Maybe this blog will end up nowhere. Maybe I will end up being right where I am. Yet, I got to live this possibly 'unsafe' choice of attempting to be an author of some worth. 

Image: Safe/Unsafe by Susmita Paul (c) 2013

Moving on

The animal world is pretty.

More so when it comes to the aspect of letting go. The parent teaches the young ones to fly, to walk, to run, to fetch for itself. And then, the young ones move on. It is only us, humans, who love to cling on to the past - the ugly and the beautiful alike. We keep intact our baggage of grudges. We firmly hold on to the past when we should be living in the now. The graduation ceremonies are mere eyewash, even to the intelligent homo sapiens. And I am no exception.

I had nurtured a beautiful virtual place of companionship : Lustrous Lives for the past 3 years or so. It is a homely little space where I wrote to seek a meaning in life. It is a home where I found friends and readers from all across the world. It is that graduation board that made it inevitable for me to move on. It is the confidence of the amazing readers of Lustrous Lives that gave me the courage to move on, beyond the comfort zone of familiar readers and safe writing (will elaborate on this aspect in upcoming posts).

Wordiculture is the experience of moving out of your parents' house to fetch a life of your own. It will be my writing pad from now on. I will be sharing writing experiences, anecdotes, excerpts of my published and mostly unpublished writing and the general hullabaloo (an interesting discussion on the etymology of the word  by +Anatoly Liberman appears here) of life that makes me write. I will also be writing about my writer friends whom I meet along the way.

To be truthful, I don't have the full list of the ideas that Wordiculture will host. I simply know that, it is time for me to move on from the third person narrative voice of Lustrous Lives to the true  out-of-tune voice that is uniquely me. Wordiculture is going to be a journal of that adventure.

I invite you on this adventure and promise lots of hiccups and devastation on the way. As a side-kick, you might as well end up knowing a really ordinary person, just like you.

Join in, if you will.

looking birds

Image taken at Phi Phi Islands, 2011