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ABM Musa (1931-2014)

Cracks in the soul

Syed Badrul Ahsan
In October 1997, ABM Musa was part of the Bangladesh prime minister's team to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Edinburgh. Sensing that there was really little for him to do, he asked me in humorous fashion, ’Badrul, have you brought me to Britain to walk around, eat hamburgers and do nothing else?" He was trying to prove a point: good journalists, once they find they are suddenly free of writing, are in a state of chaos. Work keeps them going. It kept Musa, our very dear Musa Bhai, going all his life
That life definitely a rounded one made substantive by the energy he brought into it over the decades, came to an end yesterday. At eighty three, he died -- you could safely suggest - in harness. Aged journalists, like old soldiers, never die. They fade away. And yet for Musa, life was never a matter of dying or fading away. Towards the end of his life he was on various talk shows on the many television channels, offering the nation wisdom gleaned from a lifetime spanning an entirety of national history.
Journalism was what Musa Bhai understood best It was at the tender age of nineteen that he came into the profession, through linking up with Insaf. He never had cause to look back. His trajectory of life, taking within its
ambit the tumultuous times it came wrapped in, took him to ever widening spheres of experience. After Insaf, it was the Pakistan Observer which beckoned, followed by a stint with the Sangbad before he made his way back to the Observer. In later life, hegavethe Morning News the benefit of his association. And then of course there was Jugantor.
But what made Musa different from so many other journalists was not so much his work for the various newspapers that called him as it was the richness that increasingly defined his professionalism. At the news desk, he clearly understood the need for clarity and objectivity. Neutrality, he believed like any newsman of commitment, was no part of journalism. If the newspaper did not inform and then educate the reader, its purpose amounted to little. Musa Bhai's preoccupation was to have his audience keep their ears to the ground. They did, in that era of ideal-
ism. We speak of the 1950s and 1960s. Musa Bhai's sincerity to his profession would not go unnoticed. London’s Sunday Times sought his opinion on the issues ofthe day.
For a brief part of his life ABM Musa donned the raiment of a politician. No, he sought no political office, entertained no high ambition in the corridors of power. Butwhen Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman decided that Musa needed to be by his side as a lawmaker, Musa Bhai knew what he needed to do: follow the advice of the Father of the Nation. He took part in, and won, the 1973 general elections. That phase of his life was brief, seeing that the tragedy of August 1975 gave a bad jolt to Musa's life as it did to the lives of the people of this country.
Musa Bhai may have been shaken, but he was not broken. The world was his oyster and he reached out to it At the Press Institute, at the Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha, his experience was
the input that was to enrich the lives of young men and women aiming to pursue a journalistic career.
ABM Musa's sense of humour was pronounced and often self-deprecating. He poked fun at others, taking care not to undermine and humiliate anyone he had made the object of his remarks. Close to Bangabandhu, he was part of the journalistic trio Sheikh Mujibur Rahman delighted in referring to as "aapod-bipod-musibot". Of the three men, two -Faiz Ahmed and Musa - are now gone into the ages. Only Abdul Gaffar Chowdhury remains. Two others not part of the group, KG Mustafa and Abdul Matin, have already succumbed to mortality.
ABM Musa leaves a huge void where intense journalism used to be There are cracks, in the soul and in the universe, that cannot be mended. The world of Bangladesh’s journalism cracked when the life went out of ABM Musa on