Published on 12:00 AM, March 23, 2019

A life less ordinary

Profession, Passion & the story of being!

So, I came back home at long last. The first few days of me being home was spent as if I were in a daze. Everything I saw around me, my favorite city seemed to be very attractive.  Only about nine months ago, I left this city in peril for being reduced to a stateless person. People close to me and older than me tried to talk sense into my thought process by asking me whether I have thought about my future. Well, quite frankly, I had not thought of anything. I just wanted to get out of this enslaved city of Dhaka, where I desperately wanted to breathe freely. It seemed there was no present or future left here, and the uncertainty beyond its confines seemed apparently so much more comforting. Some would say that this was absurd romanticism of a young man who had very little experience of life. I thought, at that point in time, so what?  Launching myself into the unknown would teach me to determine my future. But before I took the final leap, I went around the city, trying to find answers to my queries about life beyond it. There, obviously, was no answer. So, I left this city unceremoniously. But now that I was back here again, all worldly needs glared at my face and I had to find an answer to my basic needs. During the war, I was very busy with my responsibilities at the Liberation War Radio, and having worked with the Government in exile, I thought that in an independent Bangladesh, I would naturally join the National Government in some capacity. Money or position was not important those days; working for the nation was. Back home, when I was waiting for an opportunity to join the Government, some of my old colleagues from the advertising outfit I worked for before the war came to visit me. They said that they were anxiously waiting for me to return from the war. The advertising agency that they were working and I was heading was owned by a Pakistani entrepreneur. It was closed down mid-way through the war, and my colleagues had lost their jobs. They thought that once the war was over, I would return and open the closed shop again. This, I had never thought about before, but I could not turn down the expectations of my colleagues who have always been so dear to me. I opened the closed shop the very next day, and found my work station in exact disarray as I had left it. No one, ostensibly, entered it since I had left. My job now became simple. I had to renew contacts with the business that I had quit and reassure those that ran it about me being back in business. One advantage was that I loved my profession from the day I entered it. So, I took to it just as a fish takes to water.

 

The author is a renowned stage performer, actor & director. He is also a successful business personality.