So Mukto Mona was out of cyber world for some days. We have been facing this problem off and on following the murder of Avijit. However, it has come to life now. All Mukto Monas are happy once again.
I have been honoured to be associated with this enlighten group of people since 3 years. Mukto Mona gave me the unadulterated platform to share my thoughts and views with people whose motto has been to promote humanism, rationalism and freedom of speech with logic and sharp arguments. Senseless religious belief and dogma were criticized in a dispassionate manner to drive home the fact that the essence of human values and scientific temper always remain ahead of religions and rituals.
I accidentally came across Mukto Mona for the first time while surfing in cyber world more than 3 years back and instantly fell in love with it. First I read its articles and was pleasantly surprised to learn that my way of thinking and conviction as a human being are similar to those propagated by Mukto Mona. It was surprising to find so many people who also thought and acted like me. They considered themselves as human being first and try to bring the people particularly of Bangladesh out of century old exploitation of religion and other social injustice.
Initially, I commented on articles published in Mukto Mona. Then I mailed some of my pieces published earlier in other site to Mukto Mona owner for reading. I did not know that he was Avijit. Latter, Avijit gave me access to Mukto Mona to upload my articles. Over the years, Mukto Mona has become a part of me. I rarely had any communication with Avijit. But I am sure that he felt my presence as I felt his. Once commenting on one of my posts an angry Islamist labeled me as ‘RAW agent’ and gave half true information about my identity and location, Avijit exposed the Islamist so thoroughly on the same day that he did not have any face to respond.
I was born in erstwhile East Pakistan and spent my childhood in the ancestral village home there. When my family left East Pakistan for good, I was a broken child who felt uprooted from his soil. Even in my present elderly age I could not reconcile with loss of my mother land.
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I feel obliged to write this post script after about a week of uploading the post. My first article in Mukto Mona was “Mahakumbha: holy dip in filthy water”. In that post I tried to tell about the hollowness and stupidity of Hinduism in Mahakumbha rituals. Latter Avijit tacitly suggested that being a Hindu (at least by name), I should focus on Hinduism which would have better impact among visitors. Subsequently though I wrote a few more articles touching on some aspects of Hinduism which were neither holy nor rational, my obsession with Bangladesh had specified my area of major attention. As Mukto Mona has been a blog mainly directed towards Bangladesh and its socio-religious transition, I was sucked into the cobweb of a particular topic and type of writing. I owe no explanation to anybody; but for the memory of Avijit I have added this.
When the world sinks into this present morass of ignorance the one thing that is behind it all is the whole spectrum of religiosity. We humans have been building, farming as well as hunting for the past 200,000 years yet religions deny the existence of everyone of these forebears. The head of that denial is every purple/black/white cloaked religious fanatic without a responsible respect for their own brain let alone that of others. These preachers deny everything because they have been heavily indoctrinated and cannot now see that they are the greatest curse on humanity that has ever been – including plagues and natural catastrophes. Those scientific and political hierarchies we have at present are not standing-up and showing-up the ignorance of the religious and their pompous attitudes towards all members of humanity. Whilst the religious get away with their divisionism,, and, murderous behaviour there will be no peace on this planet. Religion has make our judicial systems corrupt which in turn makes our police corrupt, and as evil as the religious fanatics they are supposed to be guarding us all against in the name of humanity.
Sir,
Let us hope that Avijit’s murderers are arrested and punished soon. To me AQIS is not a new name. This is a Waziristan (Pakistan) based Islamist group. Earlier Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT) also took the responsibility. Then Farabi is behind the bar. It is a very complex situation. But one thing is clear that BD government is not very interested to arrest and prosecute the murderers. I believe that all Islamist groups are engaged in power game. Islam is the only tool in this power game.
I fully agree with Bhaskar that Mukto-mona offers an invaluable platform for the exchange of ideas, feelings, values etc in an enlightened way without any regard to creed, culture, race, religion or nationality. But we are very unfortunate to lose the person who was the driving force for creating such a platform. Only today I got the news from Bangladesh that an Al-Qaeda offshoot, called the Al-Qaeda Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), has claimed responsibility of murdering Avijit. If that is true, then there is a possibility that the criminal or criminals may be apprehended and we hope that day comes soon.
But whatever happens we must keep Avijit’s ideal alive and spread that ideal around undeterred. Otherwise, we will simply be defeated by those murderous Jihadists.