Aly Zaker

The title of this column is borrowed from a very popular song from many years ago which we used to hum all the time. It was a

So, I came back home at long last. The first few days of me being home was spent as if I were in a daze. Everything I saw around me, my favorite city seemed to be very attractive.

I was thinking of how the future would be in this new-born nation of ours. Looking at the void, ruling over the dark waters of the Jamuna, I was ruminating on the immediate

I arrived in Dhaka on the 10th of January. Pakistani occupation army had surrendered after an ignominious defeat in the hands of the joint forces comprising Mukti Bahini (Liberation War Army) and the Indian Armed Forces on the 16th of December 1971.

The day came and went! In fact, three of them in a row. 2018 was the golden jubilee year of the foundation of Nagorik Natya Sampradaya, the theatre group I belong to. More importantly, this is the year that marked the forty-fifth anniversary of continuous staging of plays in Bangladesh. This was a singular achievement of my group. No mean job, that!

I started working at the Shadhin Bangla Betar Kendra, the Radio in exile of the independent Bangladesh one fine morning. Alamgir Kabir was my superior as the Programme Organizer of the English Language Programme. This programme of special broadcast was introduced in consideration of the fact that the world had to be told about our war and the reasons there of. This included politics, economics, sociology and culture of the population that inhabited Bangladesh.

The train started rolling at around nine in the morning. We were initially busy with making ourselves comfortable.

Agartala's population had doubled by March 1971. Therefore, when we arrived in that town it did not seem like an Indian town. Almost everyone was speaking in our language, nay our dialect.