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Remembrance

Obaidul Haq: renaissance man

Syed Badrul Ahsan
HE was the quintessential good man. In Obaidul Huq, there was that beauteous image of a scholar and a journalist working in happy fusion. He was, if you must know, part of that company of men in whom subsisted an old-fashioned fascination for values together with a powerful presence of an understanding of realities. And we call that combination, that individual, in terms of the literary, a rounded personality. Huq was truly that, perhaps much more.
That is why we recall him, even as we inform ourselves that perhaps he should have lived longer. But he did live long, longer than many of us will or can or should. He missed out on being a centenarian by a mere four years. In those ninety six years, he proved to all of us, in nearly every region of life, that he belonged in that rare company of the wise in whose voice history found apt representation. There were the faces he recalled, the lives he remembered, the stories he had heard and the tales that he shaped in his inimitable way. Obaidul Huq was, in many more ways than one, fundamentally a union of personalities within the ambience of a single individual. He wrote fiction, of a standard that may have gone miss-
ing in these more banal of times. Think back on his novel Sangram, a tale that in time was recreated on celluloid. And speaking of the pioneering role he played in the development of movies in our part of the world, there is always that poignant point of reference, the story he called Dukkhe Jaader Jibon Gorha. If you have something of history working in you, you will know the ache that drove him to this exposure of human agony. It was pre-partition India. It was a gory spectacle of men bludgeoning men to death in a wicked demonstration of communalism. Huq was speaking for a generation that had lived, indeed was living, through some of the more macabre moments in time.
There was the perfecdy civil in Obaidul Huq's attitude to life, to people around him. Experience for him was a whole wide world of pathos and laughter, of light and shadow. As a journalist, he never lost sight of his mission — that it was to inform and enlighten, through an objective presentation of news and a dispassionate serving up of opinion. A clear sense of history, in his view, was a necessary appendage to an understanding of the world, of what lay beyond it. He admired heroic men. His observations on Bangabandhu, through the essays he penned as A Leader With A Difference, were proof of that historicity in him.
And then there was the abundance of wit in the man. It was coruscating, it was enlivening, it was invigorating. Those who heard him relate all the old anecdotes, the tales which made people double over with laughter, came away educated with an intensity you do not see in many around you. Obaidul Huq was a natural. He laughed at life even as he shed tears over its varied themes of tragic intent. He observed the world through a prism that took in light before sending out light of its own.
That is why Obaidul Huq remains a tall presence in our lives. In the passing of the seasons, it is his wisdom that leaves us dreaming of a future that could yet be, of a past that will never be a present, ever again. Huq was our renaissance man.
(Obaidul Huq, eminent journalist, movie maker, novelist and raconteur, died on 13 October 2007.)
The writer is Executive Editor, The Daily Star.