The New Nation - Internet Edition

Maswood Alam Khan

Now I realize why my mother was so desperate a few months before her death to meet her relations and acquaintances and why after her emotional reunions with her missing soul mates she used to be more desperate to persuade them into staying with her as long as she could plead with them not to leave her.

There is a metaphysical phase in everybody's life when our soul cries for meeting once again our old friends, our old classmates, our surviving relations, our old fiancés or fiancées and the one we met only for an hour or two during a train journey whose contact address or telephone number we had forgotten to note.

But, our society is dominated mostly by materialistic people who consider such low-priced emotional yearnings or shenanigans a signature of mental weakness, an epiphenomenon of worthless people who are doomed to fail to survive keeping their backbones straight and holding their heads high in this world for the fittest. To those worldly people mental phenomena are nothing more than some complex but controllable functions of the material brain governed by physical laws. They will pause to hear you if you sell anything that relates to classical physics developed by Newton and his successors. But, they will chuckle with a mocking note if tears roll down your cheeks on listening to the classical Tagore song on 'inviting old soul mates for a long sought-after rendezvous'. So, our young children feel shy to cry their eyes out in public. Their souls, nevertheless, cry in private. Their cries for help and their songs of melancholy are thus seldom heard.

Their repressed personal impulses and delicate desires are thus stored inside the transpersonal chambers of their conscious minds and later buried in the deepest regions of their unconscious psyche. No wonder, why our youngsters are nowadays so curious about pills known as 'ecstasy' and 'yaba'!

We are very busy with our mundane chores and we cannot really afford time even to say a 'hallow' to our friends and relations over telephone or drop them a few words over electronic mail, let alone while away the whole day forgetting to take meals or chat away the whole night burning the midnight oil the way we found our elders idling away their time with their kith and kin when life was easy and only the fools were busy.

There are only on two occasions when we meet in a reunion with our relations and friends: one is a formal ceremony of one's marriage and the other a grieving ceremony of one's death. In a marriage ceremony we remain reticent and reserved and cannot really afford to laugh and in a funeral ceremony our nerves are frayed and we can't help crying.

Hardly there is an occasion where we can burst out laughing like a drain. Hungry for laughing my family of cousins decided to get together at a reunion soon where we could be laughing until we would be crying.

Last Saturday was our family reunion at one of my cousins' place. We got ourselves prepared for our forays into sessions of laughter. My uncle planned the day down to the last detail. We were looking forward to a big day when we would be eating like gluttons and singing and dancing like the stark raving mad all day or possibly all night as the reunion was taking place after a couple of years.

Everything went exactly as planned. The paramount part of the reunion, a musical soirée, started off in the evening with our fondest uncle reviewing what happened to whom all these bygone years and provoking peals of laughter among the young and the old in his inbuilt way of twining his words with snippets of jokes and quips.

My cousin Chameli---the best singer in our whole family---sang the reunion premiere: a Tagore song. Young or old, singer or crooner, nobody was spared from the daunting and scary performance to sing a song. The oldest performer was eighty years old and the youngest only two.

As we all were drowning our loneliness under a warm blanket of camaraderie soothing away our pains with serene sounds of songs and music and the number of attendees was gradually tapering off we only a dozen of us, mostly elderly, did cling on till the neighborhood of the midnight to the best of the best part of the reunion: a classical Nazrul song Chameli resonated in a reedy voice punctuated by her interjecting 'raags' along with her accompanist Manju Khan, the only non-relative in the gathering and a great

Tabla performer who knows when and how to undulate his head, half-close his eyes and stare the singer in the face while fluidly beating his hand-drums to regulate the flow of 'serotonin' inside all the brains of the singer and the listeners: "Janama Janama Gelo, Asha Patha Chahi, Maru Mosaffir Choley, Paar Nahi Nahi"tt..(Many a lifetime I have already passed traveling over the 'desert of life'; still I am not dropping my gaze into the 'destination of hope' that is yet to be visible in the offing).

Alas! After twelve hours of our merry making as we were about to call it a day we sensed that the cockles of our hearts got pretty warm not at the wafts of laughter but at the warmth of tears. We enjoyed crying in delight to shed loads of tears!

No science, no philosophy should be allowed to rob us of laissez-faire right of crying, our birthright. Crying sedates pains of our souls and the songs that cry about the twinges of our life balloon us up to havens. Tears that visibly mist our eyes and tears that invisibly soak our hearts unburden our souls and unleash our minds.

Khandaker Abdul Hafiz

Anwar Al Sadat: Mohammad Anwar Al Sadat, the 3rd President of Egypt, was born on 25 December 1918 in a poor family at Mit Abul Kom town in Cairo. His father was an Egyptian & mother was a Sudanese. He was one of his 13 brothers & sisters. He was the first student at the British governing Military School for the Egyptians. He became a Royal Military Academy graduate in 1938. He made his first official visit to speak with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin as the first Arab leader in Israel. They signed Camp David Peace Accord in 1978 to bring an extensive peace. Aftermaths, Sadat & Begin were jointly awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1978. But the Muslim fundamentalists, Egyptian Islamic Jihad Organization members stood up against this treaty. They shot Sadat at the Annual Victory Parade in Cairo on 6th October 1981. He married twice. His first wife was Ehsan Madi & the second was Jehan Sadat, an Egyptian British & Associate Resident Scholar at Maryland University. He was father of one son & three daughters.

Abdus Salam: Pakistan's first & only Nobel laureate, born in 1926 at Jhang in Pakistan. He grew up in a poor firming district where his father was an education officer. He had a bright academic career. He did his M.A right from his Matriculation with scholarships at the Punjab University. In 1949, He received B.A (Hons) in Mathematics & Physics with scholarships at St. John's College, Cambridge, and stood first in both the exams. In 1951, He attained PhD at Cambridge in theoretical physics covering the fundamental works of quantum electrodynamics in his thesis. He joined Cambridge as a faculty & became a Professor at Imperial College, London. Professor Salam, Sheldon Glashow & Steven Weinberg shared the Nobel Prize in 1979 for their research in electroweak theory which articulates the mathematical and conceptual amalgamation of the electromagnetic & weak interactions. Prof. Salam was a fervent Muslim & Islam was an integral part of his life, family & career. He never got ample appreciation, as he was an Ahmadiyya Muslim in his country. He expired in Oxford due to a protracted infirmity at the age of 70.

Naguib Mahfouz: Professor Naguib Pasha Mahfouz, an Egyptian novelist & a doctor, born on December 11, 1911 at Cairo in Egypt. He is the only Arabic language writer who received this award. He had written 34 novels, over 350 short stories, 5 plays, and dozens of movie scripts. He articulated socialism, God & such issues, which were prohibited in Egypt. His books were held responsible & also prohibited in many Arab countries until after he achieved the Nobel recognition. In 1988, He received the award for his 'Cairo Trilogy'. At his time he was the oldest living Nobel laureate & the third oldest of all time. This legend died on August 30, 2006 in Cairo hospital due to kidney problems, bleeding ulcer, cardiac failure & head injury, which occurred by a fall.

Yasser Arafat: Mohammed Abdel - Raouf Arafat Al Qudwa Al Husseini, popularly known as Yasser Arafat, born on August 24, 1929 at Cairo in Egypt. His father was a textile merchant. He was admitted into the Cairo University (Formerly known as University of King Fuad II) and left the University during the Arab-Israeli War in 1948 but later on returned to complete his Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering by 1956. He dole out as a Second Lieutenant in the Egyptian Army. He originated Al - Fatah (means conquest or victory) in Kuwait in 1957. He was the 1st President of the Palestine National Authority & was the supreme commander of the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), the military force of the Palestine Liberation organization (PLO). He attained the Nobel Peace Prize along with Yitzhak Rabin & Shimon Peres for negotiation of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accord in 1994. His next of kin, Suha Arafat & his brother, Dr. Fathi Arafat, the initiator of Arab Red Crescent. Arafat died on November 11, 2004 in Paris due to mysterious infirmity.

Ahmed Zewali: An Egyptian American, born on February 26, 1946 in nearby Damanhur, the "City of Hours", only 60 km from Alexandra in Egypt. His father was engaged with government job & own business. He wrote in his autobiography regarding his mother "She was central to my 'walks of life' with her kindness, total devotion & native intelligence. He was a graduate of University of Alexandria & concluded his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S. His Post Doctoral was at the University of California, Berkely. He was rewarded, as a faculty at Caltech in 1976.He is a naturalized citizen of the U.S. since 1982.He was made the first Linus Pauling Chair in Chemical Physics & the pioneer of femtochemistry (the study of chemical reactions across femtoseconds) in history. He obtained the Nobel Prize in 1999 as a third Egyptian in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry. His wife, Dema, M.D., from Damascus University and Master's in Public Health in UCLA. All of them are getting contentment from their two daughters, Maha & Amani and two young sons, Nabeel & Hani.

Shirin Ebadi: An Iranian lawyer was born on 21 June 1947 in Hamadan, Iran. Her father was a Professor of Commercial Law & City's Chief Notary Public. She took graduation from the University of Tehran & qualified the exam to become a judge in 1969 & did Master's in 1971 in Law. She became the country's first female judge & the first woman to preside over a legislative court in 1975. But as the new ruling member of the clergy decided that women were not suitable for such responsibilities, she was exposed of her post. She got the Nobel for her courageous efforts for democracy & human rights, especially for women & children on October 10, 2003. In 2004, she scraped a court case against U.S. Treasury Department as they made impediments over publishing her memoir in the U.S. But in the extremity, she won & published her memoir. Her husband is an electrical engineer & has 2 daughters.

Mohammed El Baradi: An Egyptian diplomat, born on 17 June 1942. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Law from the University of Cairo in 1962, an LL.M in 1971 and a Doctorate in International Law in 1974 at the New York University School of Law. He is now serving as the Director General for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for a third term. Although U.S. administration tried to remove him as Director of IAEA, but finally they botched. El Baradi & IAEA jointly picked up the Nobel Peace Prize on October 7, 2005 for their efforts to thwart nuclear energy from being used for military rationale and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful perseverance is used in the safest possible way. He bestowed his Prize money to orphanages n Cairo. The IAEA's money will be spent on eradicating landmines from the developing countries. His wife's name is Aida Elkachef, a kindergarten teacher and has 2 children, Laila & Mostafa.

Mohammad Yunus: "We must address the root causes of terrorism to end it for all time, I believe putting resources into improving the lives of poor people is a better strategy than spending it on guns". (Yunus's quotation during Nobel Prize giving ceremony in Oslo.)

An Economist & Founder of Grameen Bank, born on June 28, 1940 in the village of Bathua, in Hathazari, Chittagong, the second business capital of Bangladesh. His father had jewellery business. He secured the 16th position among 39,000 students in the Matriculation Examination in the then East Pakistan. He obtained his B.A. in 1960 & M.A in 1961 from the Department of Economics, University of Dhaka. He obtained PhD in Economics from Vanderbilt University in the U.S. with Fulbright Scholarship in 1969. He engaged with Middle Tennessee State University as an Assistant Professor of Economics from 1969 to 1972. Then he moved back to his country & engaged with Chittagong University as a Professor of Economics. The only Bangladeshi Dr. Yunus & Grameen Bank was jointly declared as recipients of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to create Economic & Social development from below. During his PhD, he married to Vera Forostenko, a student of Russian Literature & has a daughter Monica Yunus, an opera singer. Their relation was broken after birth of Monica as Vera claimed that Bangladesh was not an apt place to lift up a baby & she backed to New Jersey. Yunus got hitched twice to Afrozi Yunus, Professor of Physics at Jahangirnagar University & they have a daughter. His brother Muhammad Ibrahim a Professor of Physics at Dhaka University & younger brother Muhammad Jahangir is a well-known TV personality.

Orhan Pamuk: The first Turkish person who received the award, born on June 7, 1952 at Istanbul in Turkey. He is a postmodern writer & brought up in a wealthy industrialist family. He studied at Robert College & went to Istanbul Technical University to study Architecture, as his family sought him to be an Engineer or Architect.

But he left the architecture school & passed from the Institute of Journalism at the University of Istanbul in 1976.From 1985 to 1988, he was engaged with Columbia University as a visiting scholar & fellowship at the University of Iowa. He received the Nobel on October 12, 2006 for his 'My Name Is Red'. This book has been decoded into 24 languages. The Swedish Academy cited: "In the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city, Pamuk has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures".

He became very popular in Turkey due to his prop up for Kurdish political rights. Some Turkish reckons that he awarded for being anti-Turkish and not for his writing. He tied knot to Aylin Tofajjal Turegen on March 1, 1982 & divorced in 2001.He has a daughter, Ruya (means dream in Turkish). His older brother Sevket Pamuk is an internationally recognized historian in Economics and engaged with teaching at Bogazici University in Istanbul.