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OPINION

Where is my country?

MASUD RANA SARKER writes from Ottawa, Canada
NO sooner had I logged on to internet to read news from Bangladesh than I came across the news of Professor Humayun Azad having been stabbed by as yet unknown thugs. I just wrote the other day in The Daily Star condemning the attack on Dr. Kamal Hossain. How many more protest editorials, columns and letters we do have to write in days to come, only Allah knows. Sometimes it feels good to think that in the last century as a nation we got off to a very good start. For example Satyendra Nath Bose who was once a professor of physics of Dhaka University wrote Einstein a letter in 1924 in which he described how Einstein's light quanta, the photons, could form a kind of "gas," similar to the one consisting of atoms or molecules. Einstein rewrote and improved Bose's paper and submitted it for joint publication. This new form of gas is a new form of matter in which the individual particles are known as Bosons after Bose's name. The Bose-Einstein statistics made the groundbreaking predictions about the behaviour of matter at extremely low temperatures. At such low temperatures, viscosity
of liquefied gases disappears, resulting in superfluidity. The process is called Bose-Einstein condensation.
In June 1995, Carl Weiman and Eric Cornell used high powered lasers and a new technique for cooling matter to close to absolute zero to super-cool about 2000 atoms of rubidium. These atoms were found to possess the qualities of a Bose-Einstein condensate. Shortly afterwards, Wolfgang Ketterle reproduced the result. For their work , these three scientists shared the 2001 Nobel Prize.
I cited the above things to say that Bangladesh was the country where Mr. Bose was once a professor. This is the country which created Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. This country during the British colonial period was the cultural point and, before the British came, was the most enriched place in the subcontinent. Intellectually and culturally we started as a leader. In today's intellectual, scientific and political bankruptcy of Bangladesh, Humayun Azad is a prominent intellectual, litterateur and linguist with bold and stubborn intellectual honesty. He is the linguist who requested funding from then President Ershad for a long term research project to write a Bangla dictionary but was
rejected. Those who know the importance of research in Bangla language and for that matter of a Bangla dictionary as a backup to the development in science and literature of Bangladesh understand what a missed opportunity it was not to utilise as profound and resourceful an asset as Humayun Azad. Today he is struggling for his life at CMH.
My pen knows no word to condemn this brutal attempt to kill Prof Azad. I am wondering which country it is that cannot give security to Prof Azad, Dr. Kamal, opposition political leaders, not to mention the common citizenry. Is this my country? My country -- the one where Bose, Tagore, Shahidullah grew and flourished freely and without inhibition. I have got to tell you this is not my country that has tried to kill its best children. Mine is not the country where one of the best children is lies stabbed in the hospital while his family is gets threat call. It seems like I have lost my country. It is not the first time but there has been a persistent continuity of countless featherruffling and hackle-raising incidents in this land of lost country. Is there any lost-and-found service in this universe where I can write to, call or go to in order to look for my lost country?