There is no doubt that the nation adored him. Many of his fans and friends even worshipped him. Film lovers in India and Pakistan also highly respected his skills and versatility as an actor. Yet Razzak was a humble man and gave our film industry everything he possibly could without asking much in return.

Being someone who is keen on watching films that were made on our Liberation War in the early seventies and the films that made an impact on our nation's movement for freedom, for me, Zahir Raihan is a legend.

The leftwing politicians of the time were honest, patriotic, and pro-people; however, they were not able to go as close to the heart of the masses as could Bangabandhu's Awami League. He and his party represented middle-class values but were very sensitive as well to the plight of the downtrodden.

During those days, a young man, full of determination, joined the movement against British Raj to free his countrymen from the clutches of colonial rule. His name is Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Did the Chileans kill Salvador Allende and replace him with General Pinochet, a military dictator who took his people a hundred years back? Were the great patriots of Africa, Asia and Latin America killed by their own people? But the final verdict is history's. A great patriot doesn't die, he returns with a thunder. His people keep him alive in their hearts.

One has to agree that in the political progression of a nation, the obvious has to be stated time and again. The fact that public memory is short and that there have been efforts to deliberately twist the history of our political struggle should, in fact, compel us to delineate the authentic course of our history.

I first saw Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the future Bangabandhu and the father of a new nation, in 1946 when I went to Calcutta to begin my college education. He was then a final year student in Islamia College (now Maulana Azad College) where the formal attire of Muslim students was black achkan.

From a very young age, Gazi Shahabuddin was a voracious reader. He would read whatever he could lay his hands on.

We can recall with respect that Justice AB Mahmud Husain was the second chief justice of Bangladesh, immediately after the constitution of the Supreme Court.

This year July 24 marked the birth centenary of Captain Mustafa Anwar, who was a pioneer Bengali Muslim pilot in the Indian subcontinent.

Tajuddin Ahmad took over as the finance and planning minister in Bangabandhu's first cabinet sworn in on January 11, 1972, and on the morning of January 12, I received an urgent summons from the prime minister to meet him when he conveyed his decision to appoint me as the finance secretary.

An authority on constitutional issues, his views on matters of national importance were dearly valued in times of crisis. He was a quintessence of objectivity, with no penchant for any political dogma.

My parents, so far and yet so near - I look for them around me, in their friends, in relatives and in me. We all carry bits of them with us. And I try to reconstruct an ideology, a way of life, a way of thinking, a way of being. The objects that would help such reconstruction are not easily accessible or available anymore. But I would like to tell their story around some of the artefacts that were around them. Each of these brings out certain aspects of their character, their response to ideas. One such object is the 'Venus Bust'.

The real Fayza Apa was the most soft-hearted person in the world. She was frustratingly generous and kindhearted. Frustrating, because there was no way you could dissuade her from buying gifts for you – and she bought gifts for practically everyone she knew and even for those she didn't.

Your radiance remains undimmed despite your physical absence. It remains in everyone who had the opportunity to know you, to befriend you, to love you. I am happy today, Ishrat Akhond. Happy to have had you as a friend and learn that happiness is a choice.

This baggage will be an inescapable part of our reality for the years to come. But the memory of Faraaz's actions lightens the load. It helps to remember that our background isn't one that harboured murderers, but one that instilled a very young man like Faraaz with so much strength, maturity and love for humanity.

September 11, 2001, attack on Twin Towers in New York. We all remember the paralysing aesthetic of the live image of the attack on the second tower that the global news channels continued for days to air.

On July 1, 2016 Faraaz Ayaaz Hossain, Abinta Kabir and Tarishi Jain lost their lives along with 19 other hostages and two police officers in the worst terrorist attack of our history. They were bright young individuals, brilliant students and most of all, the best of friends.

If “life is lived forward but understood backward”—as the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once put it—Choudhury can look back and easily say in the words of the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet: “This is how you must love the earth/so you can say 'I have lived.'”

One of my earliest memories of my grandmother's house is that of her bookshelves stacked with copies of Begum magazine.