Me, myself and Mukto-mona 

Ashraful Alam 

 

[I'd like to dedicate this article to Mr. Syed Kamran Mirza, who introduced me to Mukto-mona, and Mr. Aparthib Zaman, who has converted this author's less than average self into a more than average self in a matter of ten months, without his being aware of it. It gives me immense joy to realize if God exists, I would be with most Mukto-mona friends in hell. Cheers everyone.]

I have a confession to make: I am not a writer. I don't know about when and how you people -- the writers -- started to write, but the very concept of writing has plagued me since before I heard the word "plague".  "No no Alam, your essays lack cohesion, uniformity, sense of purpose" said my school teacher. "Masud, it's ok not to be good at everything" was an award-winning consolatory remark from my father. Although all these chillingly displeasing affairs have made my skin battle-hardened, ready-to-combat, they also clipped my once rectangular shaped confidence of writing ability into an oddly shaped pentagon. So, when an invitation to write is skittered toward me, I give it as much of a circumspect look as a highly potent catholic priest does these days to young boys. But then, if a particular group of people holding the belief that the Earth is only six-thousand years old can claim themselves to be scientist, what's so wrong in my chipping in for few sentences at such an invitation. I mean what's the worst scenario that can happen: I will receive few private emails requesting me to burn my calories in some other discipline. But that's just the same old tune in a new harmonica I have already suffered through. Therefore with the dice being loaded on the occasion of Mukto-mona's first anniversary, I choose the sixer.

Mukto-mona is on the air, mukto-mona is on the land, mukto-mona is everywhere in-between. Pardon this hyperbole, but let me finish. Have mercy on the cowboy whose lasso is made of nylon! It's about two years ago when the entire macrocosm of faith in me splintered into billions of tiny particles, most of which slipped away smugly into the graveyard of irrationality, while some of which were to stay a bit longer. It was a colossal empire of blind faith I had built, mostly as a result of the continuation of family tradition coupled with lack of exposure to materials that spawn the critical thinking ability. Not that I was dissatisfied being a pious man, who with his more or less strict devotion to the rituals were gathering buckets and buckets of neki'hs (rewards) in a rate that might have exhausted god's neki'h warehouse. Thanks god I left Him; what an embarrassment that would've been for the neki'h distribution manager and his stock-holders, otherwise. Dissatisfaction with faith having been counted off, a temptation toward Physics and its fineries -- things that are no less appealing than Audrey Hepbern in Roman Holiday -- sowed the first seed of doubts.

If you don't mind a momentary digression, I'd like to say I am feeling like a tempestuous writer like who writes in bursts. Three lines of blustery scribing followed by eons of silence. Moreover, every now and then the cerebral hemisphere gets clouded with alarmingly irrelevant thoughts. Right now, I am thinking how many people have actually made it this far and how many words I've written so far. So, a nice little run of this essay through Microsoft Word's word-count. Ah, not bad. Bil Gates rocks!

As I was saying, Physics and being able to sense its inherent beauty then hurled a particularly large brick down my faith-door. Away from family, no fear of persecution by righteous(!) believers -- so I woke up to open the door. Upon entering, Schrodinger's cat conferred on me a cataclysmic slap. Spatttt! What on earth was that for?

Schrodinger's cat: "Thou who haveth the brain the size of a grain of salt shalt have irrational belief."

Scribe: "But but, I didn't have the opportunity, after all."

Schrodinger's cat: "Thy idiocy knows no bounds. Opportunity not necessarily flowth unto one. Thou should haveth tried to earn thy opportunity too."

And gone into thick air the cat. Is that an illusion, or is that real? What smothering confusion! Where am I heading? In that pool of confusion, I finally started feeling a emptying hollowness of losing something very dear. It was faith. It was eroding too fast for comfort. One of the vital thread that binds me with my family in so many levels was unwinding, sparking moments of depression. The transition from blind-belief to Science, religiosity to rationality started to wear me down as the battle was becoming too taxing mentally and because of the constant, herculean effort required to switch to the new polarity. I was looking for supportive people of my own culture and society. Entered into the scene, Mukto-mona.

Boy, was I blown away by a blitzkrieg of joy and an enormous intellectual tide! You name them, Mukto-mona have them. Aparthib Zaman, Abul Kashem, Fatemolla, Shabnam Nadiya, Avijit Roy, Syed Kamran Mirza and the list goes on with an array of writers with unabated skill and flair. But more importantly, they are all, excepting minor divergence at opinions and logistics, on the same boat as me trying to achieve a common goal: Establishing a society free of dogma, class-difference, hidden-racism and based on secular progressive laws. I must admit that when I first joined Mukto-mona, I had similar goal in mind, but my knowledge on the nuances of the goal was next to zilch. Ever since my admission, Mukto-mona has been a godsend (pun intended) for me. It is as if a  gradual discovery of my own self through an acquaintance of knowledge that I have always felt I should have had. It is as if old grieves, known or unknown, are slowly mellowing out to make place for new celebration, relay the news to friends. In the words of Walt Whitman,

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

Long live Mukto-mona.