A pedagogue's authorial feat

The most eye-catching feature of all textual feats by Associate Professor Sarwar Morshed is his amazing dexterity to exercise and brandish the terrific command he holds over English vocabulary and the diversity of subjects he deals with. These reflections flashed across my mind a few days ago while going through his book In the Castle of My Mind, published by Academic Press and Publishers Library, Dhaka in February 2015. His books contain precious things for sophomoric readers as well as for those eager to have something to read for amusement on an unoccupied afternoon while sipping at a cup of tea. This versatility in the authorial physiognomy of Sarwar Morshed makes him an apt excavator of various terrains of knowledge and an ideal writer for dissemination of learning too. 

In the Castle of My Mind is a compilation of a handsome number of articles by Sarwar Morshed published in different domestic and foreign newspapers like The Daily Star, The Bangladesh Observer and The Oslo Times of Norway. The author's extensive knowledge on literature glows from a number of allusions to Thomas Hood, William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Alfred Newman and some more litterateurs. The author's remembrances ranging from his student life up to his current pedagogical job and many other events in between have been stitched together with thoughtful words and frequently allegoric expressions in this book. The saucy dash of humorous bits and pieces in several articles of the book are even more plausible and noteworthy. Education, domestic and international affairs, sports, festivals, travelogues, literature and linguistics cover the themes Sarwar Morshed has worked on while writing this book. Despite the figurative and outside-the-box diction found in his books, Sarwar Morshed seems to be juggling with words while hammering his points home. However, this sportive approach does not curtail the depth of his statements; rather it makes his views and observations all the more whetted and penetrative. Moreover, some self-innovated maxims make the author resemble a reincarnation of Francis Bacon recalling some of the aphorisms that made Bacon famous during the 16th century and the centuries that followed. To quote a few aphoristic lines from In the Castle of My Mind, "You cannot step twice in the same river", "One life is too poor, too weak for people's revenge", "Writing for the authors is an architectural tool" etc. 

The author has touched upon some social issues like moral degeneration, rise of crimes, overpopulation---all with a laughter-evoking but emphatic undertone simultaneously. Some cultural changes in the Bangladeshi society have been addressed in his article on Pahela Baishakh (Bengali New Year). Cross-border issues like BGB--BSF flag meetings, the murder of a Bangladeshi girl named Felani, frontier problems with Myanmar have also been emphasized in some of the articles of In the Castle of My Mind. In a couple of articles the author has looked back on his years in the United Kingdom where he went several years ago to embellish his profile with a higher academic qualification. 

The traumatic plethora of road mishaps in Bangladesh has been highlighted in another piece of writing in this book. At the same time, in another article the author's dream to transform Bangladesh into a paradise of "inexhaustible love" and "amity" jingles with his patriotic enthusiasm and his glance ahead for a blissful motherland. A line from Friedrich Nietzsche quoted in the book is still revolving in my mind: "Where there are graves, there are resurrections". The author's leaning towards the concept of metempsychosis emanates from this citation and this reference to resurrection reminds us of poetry by the New England poets of colonial America while the Americans were passing through a rigorous episode under the theocratic truncheons of Puritanism. 

A few words should be offered to evaluate the title of the book. The author's thoughts, reflections, memories, ideas and glimpses of various things happening around him have taken a crystallized and solidified form in his mind, like objects of archaeological value are preserved in museums. In my assessment Sarwar Morshed has applied the word "castle" as an allegoric replacement for the word "archive". The valuable patches of the author's remembrances and sagacity have added to the book the quality of a textual drive to reexamine a broad spectrum of academic, political, social, economic and international phenomena. 

All the articles ornamenting the pages of In the Castle of My Mind deserve close perusal if readers search for solid amusement and seek to expand their ideas about multidisciplinary turfs. And as stated above, Sarwar Morshed's books all along serve as a powerful mechanism for fortifying the readers' clutch on English words and phrases and the way those lexical instruments should be applied in written and verbal discourses. So, the didactic angle of his books also needs to be envisioned while writing or speaking on his authorial dexterity. 

The reviewer is Senior Lecturer, Department of English, Metropolitan University, Sylhet.