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In Memoriam

Dr. Jalal Alamgir: A generation of new heroes

Zafar Sobhan
WHAT a tragedy for us all that not four months after a road accident took the lives of Tareque Masud and Mishuk Munier that we are once again burying one of Bangladesh's finest sons. It almost seems too much that in addition to all the travails we must suffer that at the same time we keep losing the best and the brightest of a new generation of Bangladeshis.
Dr. Jalal Alamgir was one of a new generation of Bangladeshis striding forth onto the world stage with confidence and assurance and who were destined to help transform the image of the country in the eyes of the world. A tenured professor of political science at UMass Boston by the age of 40, who had completed his PhD from Brown University in four years, Jalal was a rising academic superstar whose incisive thinking and insightful analysis had won him respect and renown, both within his field and among readers of the Huffington Post, Foreign Policy and The Nation, among other top-drawer publications clamouring for his services.
As a member of the Drishtipat Writers Collective, some of his most valuable work had to do with Bangladesh, indeed at the time of his death, he was putting the finishing touches on a co-edited book on Bangladesh's foreign policy. I remember my satisfaction on learning his plans for a dissection of Sharmila Bose's revisionist history of 1971, to add his voice to the academic case against her. We couldn't have had a better advocate, and with Jalal on the case, I knew that our intellectual history was in safe hands.
Not that you'd have ever guessed that Jalal was a heavyweight intellectual other than in the evidence of his obvious intelligence and ready wit. He was otherwise incredibly modest and unassuming, light-hearted and funloving, immediately likeable. No one ever guessed at college that his father was a powerful politician back in Bangladesh, and his august father was astonished to find him surviving on a shoestring in a tiny apartment with no heat when he went to visit his son at Brown in the middle of a Rhode Island winter, because he didn't want to trouble his old man for money.
Perhaps the most revealing and important testaments are the ones pouring in from his students for whom he was a much-loved
teacher who inspired them and changed the way they looked at the world. It’s wonderful to see how much he meant to so many people and how many lives he touched. His rate my professors ranking is off the charts. Of course it is. With his patience, kindness and easy friendliness, together with his razor-sharp mind and ability to explain things simply, Jalal was the perfect teacher.
At the end of the day we can't lose sight of the human scale of the tragedy. Jalal wasn't just a hero who belonged to us all, more importantly he was a friend, a son, a brother, and most importantly a husband, and it is those who knew him closest and loved him best who will miss him the most. Not because he was a star and they are proud of him, although he was and they are, but because he was theirs and he loved them and they loved him, and now he's gone.
No one will miss him more than his beautiful and equally brilliant wife and soul-mate Fazeela Morshed whose loss the rest of us cannot imagine. They were perfect for each other, a matched pair. Growing up in Dhaka in the 1980s, Fazeela had been the great beauty of our youth, with legions of admirers, but when she showed up from Boston with Jalal on her arm years later, everyone had to admit that the game was up, and fold their hand, she'd found her perfect man.
The story of this new generation of Bangladeshis contains a disquieting number of untimely deaths of brilliant and talented young men and women who never had the chance to fulfill their potential, their lives cut cruelly short by providence.
This generation doesn't have a liberation war and we don't have martyrs who gave their lives in battle for the birth of the nation, but we do have young men and women who were a pride to the nation and we owe it to them no less than an earlier generation owes it to the martyrs to turn this country into something. We have a new generation of Bangladeshi hero. They may not have died heroically, but they lived heroically, and that’s what counts.
The rest of us must soldier on, taking courage from the example of our fallen brothers and sisters. We need to keep their dreams alive. We need to honour their memory by continuing to fight the good fight. We owe their memory at least that much.
The writer Is a Dhaka-based editor and columnist.