Editorial
The passing of Bazlur Rahman
A journalist of principle and highest ethical standard
BAZLUR Rahman was one of the more enlightened men of his generation. It was this enlightenment he brought into the calling of journalism he pursued all his adult life, until that life was brought to a sudden, inexplicable end on Tuesday. In life, Rahman personified the aesthetics he thought should underpin the functions of the media world. Had he not died young, for sixty seven years is but youth when one considers the broad canvas on which men like Bazlur Rahman work, he would have enriched even more the world of our news gathering and our commentaries on men and matters. And yet in the more than six decades that he lived, Rahman did make a difference.
And he did that through holding fast to the thought that journalism was a principled vocation. As editor of a prominent Bengali language daily newspaper Sangbad, he made it his constant goal to keep himself and his colleagues focused on the need for truth carried on the vehicle of objectivity. There was decency in him, the sweeping scale of which was manifested in the soft-spoken yet determined manner in which he interacted with others. Like any good, committed journalist, Bazlur Rahman believed in hearing out others before he proffered his own opinion on the social and political issues of the day. And, as one swearing fealty to democratic norms of behaviour, he never tried, not once, to ram his opinions, be they political or social or any other, through. That was one reason why he remained, endlessly, the repository of respect.
Bazlur Rahman was a thorough political being, apart from being a full-blooded journalist. Seeing the world, in his youth, through the prism of the Communist Party and then the National Awami Party, he quietly and necessarily graduated to the belief that political doctrines are nothing if they do not prepare men for pragmatic adjustment with the world of the real. And yet within that real world Rahman tried fashioning a vast region of values. He died as he lived -- wedded to the core values which made him reach out to others, to share those values with them and remain honest to the very last.
In losing Bazlur Rahman, we lose a huge chunk of ourselves. In recalling him, we may yet build on the traditions he and the rest of us have consistently believed in.
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