Shubho Nababarsha
The advent of the Bangla New Year is once again an opportunity for us to celebrate the cultural heritage we as a nation are heir to. Baishakh is thus a season when we recall the spirit that has over a thousand years gone into the making of our identity as a people. Be it politics, be it culture, be it overall society, Baishakh has had a tremendous bearing on our consciousness as a people. As a free nation today, we remain fully aware of the import of the occasion and indeed rekindle in ourselves the feeling that every New Year is for us also a chance to branch out to the wider world outside our politico-cultural domain.
From such a perspective, Pahela Baishakh is not a time when narrow parochialism takes over our self-awareness as a people and pushes us into isolation. Bengalis, as has been proved over and over again, are a people for whom modernity is a given and a natural truth. On this day, we let the message flow forth from within our land and our nationhood that ours is a culture which only enriches the wider cultural sphere which the global population inhabits. Therefore, when we celebrate Baishakh, we are only making our own humble and yet substantive contribution to the growth and fostering of intellectual linkages among the international community. At home, the arrival of Pahela Baishakh is for us at once a reminder of our past and a preview of what our future can be. It will not do to forget that one of the inspiring ideas behind our struggle for political freedom was the timeless culture that came encapsulated in its observance. We as a nation have had to wade through mighty currents and crosscurrents to earn the right to have our cultural and social ethos restored in the days prior to the liberation of the country.
This morning, as we usher in the first dawn of another Baishakh, we will pray that the New Year brings for us a chance of a renewal. We will look forward to positive political changes in Bangladesh. We remain optimistic that a new spring, one where democracy and government based on the consent of the governed will redefine our priorities for the times ahead, will enrich our journey through the year 1415.
We wish our readers Shubho Nababarsha.
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