DT
OPINION 13
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2015
Forgive us, teachers We have failed to treat our teachers with their due respect
Muhammed Zafar Iqbal’s hopes were washed away that day
They must think themselves immune to punishment. And can you blame them? Are members of student political groups ever brought to justice?
n Nibir Mostafa Khan
L
ast month, an act of the most unacceptable kind took place at Shahjalal Institute of Technology. A group of “students” assaulted, abused, and harassed their teachers on campus because of some reason or another, involving politics and the VC. I refrain from even elaborating on the reason properly because it’s not important. There can be no justification for what has been done. Under no circumstance can a student harass his or her teachers. I am ashamed to be in the same ranks as these students after what has happened. I condemn this act and demand justice. It’s not enough, but I offer my sincerest apology to the teachers who have had to go through this ordeal. After the torturing and killing of multi-
MAHMUD HOSSAIN OPU
ple children in Bangladesh recently, I had thought nothing that happened in this country would faze me. But I stand corrected. I am amazed at what we as a nation are capable of doing. If killing those kids was the maximum extent to which a human being could physically damage another human being, students harassing and abusing their teachers in a university campus is the psychological equivalent, and this has damaged the core of the morals and standards that we Bangladeshis are so proud of. Each and every one of us must feel responsible for what has happened. It is my understanding that the “students” who were behind this are linked to a certain political party. They must think themselves immune to punishment. And can you blame them? Are members of student political groups ever brought to justice? All we can do is hope that this time things will be different. We must now ask ourselves how this was allowed to happen. Why on Earth should we have to see this happen to our teachers? Where did we go wrong? Our conscience as a whole has taken a dive somewhere in the last decade or so, and we are only realising it now due to recent events which have come to the surface. A significant decrease in our sense of morality has taken place; we must find the cause and stop it while we still can. The damage though, has been done. We, along with the teachers, will never recover from this occurrence. Though we may forget it from time to time, being the goldfish memory nation we are, I believe most of us will take this to our
graves. For me, personally, I will never be able to erase the image of Zafar Iqbal sir sitting in the rain, broken and alone like so many of his characters have been in the past, protesting what had happened to him and his wife, going on record to say things like: “I should hang myself if any of those men were my students” and “I don’t want any trials, I can endure it, I have very thick skin.” The ever optimist magician of words, forced to use sentences that should never escape a teacher’s lips. It is one of the most depressing things I have ever seen in my life. The fact that he could’ve chosen to stay abroad and preferred to teach here makes it worse. There were other teachers who were victims of this act, especially the teacher whose shirt was torn in the most savage way possible. What is the use of building drones, going to the top universities, winning science and math Olympiads, if we can’t even teach our students the basics of courtesy and morality? What is the value of success if we are not even proper human beings? I wish there was an instant solution for this, but there isn’t one. This time, we aren’t even sure where we went wrong, just that we have strayed from the path. But being the optimist that I am, I still have faith in this generation and, hopefully, we’ll pull through, much like how the characters of Dr Muhammed Zafar Iqbal always do. l Nibir Mostafa Khan is an intern at the Bangladesh Enterprise Institute.