Our Baishakh dreams and prayers

LET there be a celebration of the Bengali spirit today. It is a spirit that has done us well through the centuries. Baishakh is a good deal more than a simple beginning of a new year. It is, indeed, a paean to heritage, a highlighting of the cultural traditions we are heir to. Baishakh is a harkening back to the past in as much as it is a comprehension of the present and a prediction of the future.

If the past was our beginning, through inaugurating a new season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and that in a gathering of nature's fresh offering sprouting from Bengal's soil, the present is that moving moment in time when we come of age, with every fair breeze that blows by. The future will be what we make of it, conceived as it will be in the dreams we shape about the place of this people's republic in the global scheme of things.

This morning, on yet another inaugural day of Baishakh, our dreams get the better of the banalities we live through. Those dreams come in association with the prayers we have on offer, before the Lord of the Universe, outpourings of the heart that keep us riveted to the thought that the land is as much ours as we are the land's.

Our dreams come wrapped in the glory of our attainments of the past. They zoom in on the soul, on the endless songs it has sung of a Golden Bengal someday coming to truly define our collective being as a nation. That people will have enough to eat, that they will have cause for mirth and laughter, that they will sing of the joys of being alive is a thought we push forth a little more this morning.

It is a thought passed on to us by Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, by the brave men who steered the nation to freedom under the banner of the Mujibnagar government, by the three million Bengalis, our own, who bit the dust in order for us to reach out for the stars. That is the essence of our dreams. And yet there is more.

On Pahela Baishakh, we dare to dream of old injustices crumbling away through bringing all those aging collaborators of the Pakistan occupation army before the law, the better to let the world know that as good people, as citizens of a poor but self-respecting country, we do not let ancient dishonour ride roughshod over us. We do not forget; and we will not forgive before we have the guilty do penance for the crime of committing outrage against their own people.

And there are other dreams. We dream of a society where secular politics will be the governing principle of this land. That this is a nation of Bengalis of all religious beliefs and persuasions, that it is Bengali nationalism we will uphold despite the predatory instincts of men only too ready to go tribal, is a dream we pursue on the steamy streets and in the quiet villages of this country. We go on dreaming . . . of the indigenous people of Bangladesh, of its original inhabitants, being able to live a life to their satisfaction.

That no one not from their timeless expanse of geography will terrorise them any more, that no one will be audacious enough to burn down their huts and turn them into frightened refugees in the land of their ancestors, that their young will not be shot as they defend their honour and their heritage, that their children will unleash their imagination in the language of their fathers is a dream we weave in the arbour of our hearts this morning.

And we pray that the remnants of darkness will flee on the dawn of our shaping of dreams. We pray that those who have corrupted themselves through unmitigated exploitation of national resources will not return to commandeer high office again. We pray that the men, in politics and in academia, who have in the past mutilated the history of Bangladesh will no more emerge on to the highway to make a mess of our lives again.

Our prayers are for a redemption of the old spirit . . . that there will arise in this country of poetry and struggle leaders who have the stature and the intellectual accomplishment to lead us out of the woods and into a gleaming valley of justified hubris brought on by our collective pride in a coruscating past.

Our prayers reach up to the heavens this morning, for they relate to what we mean to do below on the portion of earth we inhabit as Bengalis. That we will build on the aspirations of our parents' generation, that we will pass the torch, glowing in good cheer, on to our children in order for them to pass it on to their children is a prayer that flows from our souls on this new day of a new year.

On Pahela Baishakh, we dream of a twinkling city on the hill that will speak to us of the fulfillment of the dreams which Rabindranath Tagore shaped along the banks of the Jamuna, which Kazi Nazrul Islam forged in the intensity of dark misery, which Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman held aloft through blood and fire and human endurance down the winding passages of our journey into nationhood over time. We dream of happiness in starlight. We pray, for stars to dot the firmament of our expectations.