An elegy for Pranab Mukherjee from Bangladesh
He was an unfeigned admirer of Bangladesh.
By Anwar A. Khan
In a political career spanning five decades, Pranab Kumar Mukherjee (December 11, 1935 – August 31, 2020) wasa senior leader in the Indian National Congress and occupied several ministerial portfolios in the Government of India. He served as the 13th President of India from 2012 until 2017.
He was an unfeigned admirer of Bangladesh.
The common traits of accomplished people-intelligence, perseverance, and stimulating social environments-are hardly found like him in in India.
His ideal, as we find, embodied the necessary or important tenets of humanism, which considered Pranab Mukherjee the centre of the universe, limitless in his capacities for development, and led to the notion that men should try to embrace all knowledge and develop their own capacities as fully as possible.
His human being is the central or most significant entities in the Southeast Asian world. Pranab was polymath like an individual whose knowledge spans a significant number of subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.
People should idolise him, but his veneration is the reverence due to the ideals of perfect beatitude; it ought not to be inspired either not only by hope or anything else.
He shot an arrow into the air that fell to earth, he knew where; for, so swiftly it flew, the sight which could follow it in its flight.
Long, long afterwards, I think in an oak tree, we shall find the arrow, still unbroken; and the song, from beginning to end, we shall find again in the heart of a great Bengalee friend like him.
To him ‘Secularism’ has a broad range of meaning. Like our old songs, those golden days shall forever remain cherished and nostalgic; and as a part of a senior citizen’s waking dream! Now he has gone to an endless sleep!
His life was the song of life in our life’s long journey, dear fellow traveller, we met you for a while only to depart! What remains are the sweet memories to torment our lonesome heart!
Since beauty is only skin deep, and fades with the passing of time, let us stay away from such come-ons as we journey on this road of life.
Plenteous tributes have poured out for Pranab following his death.
But death is nothing at all. It does not count. He has only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. He is he, and we are we, and the old life that he lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever he was to each other, that we are still. Call him by the old familiar name. Speak of him in the easy way which we always used. Put no difference into our tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.
Think of him, pray for him. Let his name be ever the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity.
Why should he be out of mind because he was out of sight? He was but waiting for you or us, for an interval, somewhere very near just round the corner. All is well. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!
When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety. When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear. When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity. Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.
Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us. Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened. Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves. And when great souls die, after a period of peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For, they existed.
He did reach his full potential, but the memories he made in his long time, he will live in the hearts of his friends and loved ones.
Remember him when he was gone away, gone far away into the silent land; when we can no more hold him by the hand, nor we half turn to go yet turning stay. Remember him when no more day by day. We tell him of our future that he planned, only remember him, as we understand. It will be late to counsel then or pray. Yet, if we should not forget him for a while and afterwards remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave, a vestige of the thoughts that once we had, better by far we should not forget and smile than that we should remember and be sad.
Time does not bring relief; we all have lied. Who told us time would ease us of our pain! We miss him in the weeping of the rain; we want him at the shrinking of the tide; the old snows melt from every mountain-side, and this year’s leaves are smoke in every lane, but last year’s bitter loving must remain heaped on our heart, and our old thoughts abide. There are a hundred places where we fear to go, —so with his memory we brim. And entering with relief some quiet place where never fell his foot or shone his face. We say, “There is memory of him here!”
And so, stand stricken, so remembering him.
Do not go gentle into that good night, old age should burn and rage at close of day; rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is not right, because their words had forked no lightning, they do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, and learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight, blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, our dear friend Pranab Mukherjee, there on the sad height, bless you now with our fierce tears, we pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Now, and with no need of tears, here we left him, full of years, — left him to his quiet rest in the region of the blest.
We know his name, his happiness and sorrow we know; while we pause on the crossing we lived it once more, and back to our heart surge that river of woe; that but in the breast of a mother can flow; for the little white hearse has been, too, at our door.
An elegy for Pranab Mukherjee:
“When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.”
Therefore, still then, let us express grief and sing a sorrowful song, while those songs shall not gladden our hearts!
My endless respect must go to this son of high moral or intellectual value; elevated in nature or style of India. And also, my deepest commiserations to his family, his near and dear ones.
A mournful poem; a lament for the dead we now sing or read. And the song of his long life of politics shall be remembered by people of all religions.
The writer is an independent political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
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