It's that time of the year, when the green and yellow is waved with a different significance.
As we head to that quintessential moment and day, December 16, it's habitual to turn back some pages and flip through the precious few, faded black and white photographs. Each snap has a story to tell beyond the emaciated, half-fed protagonists clutching their weapons. There's no way to make out any social inequality, no telling what their backgrounds are.
After the war, most returned to rural embraces, trying to pick up their lives from where they had left it. Most came back with very little, be it kin or possessions. They were difficult and trying times. With a race that was in essence every man to his own, the blanket of resilience that had sustained them through the ordeals was draped back across shoulders.
The majority of freedom fighters hadn't gone to war with any expectation save for revenge and freedom. On return they just wanted to be left to continue their lives under their own leadership -- matter of fact and humane as during the war.
There was much more to it. More, that could be penned as a book, many books. The inevitable self-seekers emerged, some from hiding, others, despicably from notoriety to make up a motley on centre stage. The shoulders shrugged. The farmer went back to his crops, the labourer his trek each called on to provide solace to the unfortunates and their families.
In the next few days, there may well be the odd feature on a gnarled old man or woman, freedom fighters, perhaps a cobbler or rickshaw puller or a retired farmer dependent on those for whom he fought but who don't know what glory they should be caring for. Most of such stories don't have happy endings; life's like that.
As with magnificent rivers, there have been twists and turns in the past 51 years. Left behind like unwanted silt and broken banks lie truths and half-truths. Inexorably, youth has given way to maturity and thereafter the wisdom and crabbedness of age. One thinks of lusts and counter lists of those that were part of the difference made.
Too many names that belong there are missing. Many that found a place there shouldn't have. Those that were left out must be gathered in. Though they didn't, don't ask for charity or recognition, they must be recognized and honoured. For that's the way, agreeable or not, the state has progressed. The cacophony of speeches from ill-adorned states where images and words are often out of place, has to be replaced by sobriety and pride.
It is when the true of such faith gather together that new stepping stones and blocks can be paved. They alone can say how the six points, four pillars, and basic goals outlined actually meet. They were all defined at stages of the independence struggle that was born out of the urge for emancipation and ran through towards building a new state.
It's time to take a look around at all that has gone wrong and reposition those on the tracks of all that has gone right. Through all that into internal dynamics, and there's hope yet.
There are those that look back and fret over the so called mistakes riddled in the past path. There's only learning to be drawn from; lessons that should inform the future. Between the isms and philosophy that have torn us apart and visions for the days ahead, there lie doubts and qualms.
Has fifty odd years been too long a time? Arguments might well so suggest. And if there's truth in that, opportunity beckons for faster progress. Society never really benefited from the advice of those putting the self first. The ones less known, that put people and the state ahead of them, will continue to spur the positives.
Theirs are the lives to be emulated.
Mahmudur Rahman is a writer, columnist, broadcaster, and communications specialist.
