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A tribute to Samad Bhai
ONCE, I told Samad
Bhai should I outlive him, 1 would write his epitaph. What I had in mind was not
quite a memorial plaque inscribed with praise on his tomb that an epitaph is, rather what I actually wanted to convey to him was my sincere desire to write an obituary to a journalist par excellence. Though a man given to piety, and he would have been a staunch believer in destiny, he somehow nodded at my idea.
This was a rather unusual proposition — given that none can be prescient about dying later or earlier between any pair of friends. But it sprang from a profound personal realisation of an indelible imprint he had made on my mind as a senior colleague during a reasonably long association with him. We had worked together in The Bangladesh Times during closing years of the '70s and into a couple of years of the '80s.
By a strange coincidence I am writing a tribute to him awash with an extra bit of personal emotion in the humble knowledge that during Samad Bhai’s interview with BBC's Sabir Mostafa on the occasion of the famed media corporation's celebration of its seventy years, Samad Bhai recalled an incident with me. A devastating cyclone struck Bangladesh in 1991, and Samad Bhai as the BBC correspondent in Dhaka was anxious to get the news out to London. The Betbunia communication tower had collapsed cutting off all communication links with the outside world. Samad Bhai was frantic but to his relief he soon discovered that a VHF opening to Delhi was available. Much that he tried to phone BBC Delhi office he could not reach anybody. At once he thought of me --1 was then Press Minister at the Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi -- he caught me on phone, had me take down three sentences, gave me a code number and asked me to deliver the message to BBC Bush House. Which I did.
I had basically forgotten the incident but he recalled it in affectionate terms when I returned to Dhaka. Going even beyond this, I carry a debt of his gratitude for mentioning my name to millions of BBC listeners at the end of his interview. The interview was replayed over BBC Bangla Service the day he died and into the following morning
as well. So my name like thousands of other names now belongs to the archives of BBC.
Between Samad Bhai and myself, we would always have serious conversations and exchanges of ideas, engaging and rewarding whenever we met or called each other. He used to modestly say: "I am a perpetual learner;" but truly he was a teacher — a natural disseminator of information. He believed knowledge and skill are a responsibility to be shared, not something to be kept to oneself or be boastful or arrogant about.
He carved his niche principally as
a reporter and narrator of events at various turning points of our national history, enjoying a lot of credence for the reliability of information he presented. His years in BBC made him a household name.
In hindsight I recall Samad Bhai’s experience in the sequel to March 25 Pak army's crackdown on Bangladesh. He was then East Pakistan bureau chief of Karachibased The Sun newspaper. As precensorship was very tight, Karachi was not receiving any information from Dhaka end. Samad Bhai was told to send news by the parent office anyway. He started sending
news circumventing pre-censorship by phrasing the bomb blasts by Mukti Bahini as "explosions were heard” at such and such place. The farcical by-election held by the then military appointed Governor of East Pakistan was unmasked by reporting the opening of Pakistan People's Party office in Dhaka on the same day that the PPP nominated its candidates for by-elections.
Samad Bhai covered some of the most important events such as the Agartala conspiracy case, education movement, movement for autonomy leading to freedom struggle, water sharing talks with India since the Farakka days, to name the obvious few. He accompanied Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in his famous journey from London via New Delhi to Dhaka after his release from Pakistani incarceration.
He had a rare knack for detail, a probing mind, a sharp intellect, a repertoire of facts that he would constantly update, and, above all, a sculptor's chiseling of whatever he crafted and delivered as a journalist or a conversationalist.
Socially committed, politically liberal, he was a relentless fighter against bigotry in all its forms. In one word, Samad Bhai was an enlightened person with a luminous
modernist temper. He was a complete journalist, from head to toe, with an abiding commitment to professionalism and journalistic ethos.
He had an endless repository of sources he could commandeer at a very short notice. He was among the most tenacious of journalists one would ever come across. Samad Bhai never believed in relayed secondary information, he would always go to the root, to the spot or the venue of any occurrence and get unalloyed facts at firsthand. He was a great facts checker constantly tapping in on various sources for corroboration, synthesis and assimilation before writing out any story.
Let me recall two of his insightful remarks. He told me during his stint with The Bangladesh Times that as a junior reporter he was so persistent in the task he would be assigned that he would have to endure annoyance from diffident officials; still he would press on till he could obtain the information he was seeking.
His second remark still rings in my ear: "Imam Shaheb, Dhaka has been taken over by people we are not familiar with. This is not the Bangladesh we knew."
The writer Is Associate Editor. The Daily Star.
E-mail ihusain.imam@thedailystar.net