Please place a rose ( f ) in front of your display name, to commemorate those killed on February 21, standing up for their mother tongue. Please forward this to all Bengalis on your list.
It seemed harmless enough, so I did as the message said.
But pretty soon, my MSN looked like this:
If you are still confused, February 21 is the Language Movement Day in Bangladesh, and marked as International Mother Language Day by UNESCO, in honour of Bengali.
In the movie Bluffmaster, one of the lead character states a profound fact - that there are certain things a man is willing to die for. For every man these things are different, but he cannot imagine a life without them. On February 21, 1952, the survival of a thousand-year-old language was important enough for a few Abdus Salams, Rafiques, Barkats and Jabbars. They gave their lives so that their mother tongue could live on.
Tags: February 21 Ekushe February Bengali
2 comments:
I remember something similar on the day they found the body of Cecilia Zhang, the young girl who had been missing for some months. Everyone was asked to place a little (x) on the MSN nick. After an hour or two, someone else started forwarding another message, that (x) was a symbol of Nazism, so you should change it to a (c) instead! So I had a mixture of (c)s, (x)s and sometimes even both.
On another note, these are days I miss being in Bangladesh.
- Farah
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