So dear Harun bhai, there you are, now gone home or the long home where you have now decided to locate yourself in. Death is such an inadequate word when dealing with someone like you. After all, you were generally unhappy with the state of the world and the way it was run. You had very little patience for fools and I understand that feeling.

You just couldn't see why people won't make that extra effort, run that extra mile or do something a tiny bit extra to make things a bit extra better. But no, nobody seriously paid any attention and you finally had enough of this ill managed world and returned to solitude of sorts and now in the biggest solitude of them all.

Most will say you died of old age ailments of several kinds that haunted you in your final years. That you spent time in the ICU for long and then finally you gave up being ailing and walked away. I know the truth. You just have had enough.

The media in Bangladesh just doesn't know how to run itself and you have spent enough time teaching it without the media learning much about it. So the level of irritation had reached decibel levels and having had enough you just looked tense as you did when you got angry you decided, "Enough, I am going".

Holiday days

I met you at the offices of weekly Holiday in the mid-80s, that wonderful time and place of adventure. Weekly Holiday was more than a professional paper which seemed to run powered by the finest of the post 1971 media world. They were people like Ataus Samad, Moazzem Hossain, Syed Kamalusddin and of course Enayetullah Khan (Mintu bhai) to name a few. Sad to say, we just don't and won't get that kind of players anymore in our current world. Even the pale copies who float around, failed politicians using the media to make a point fail to raise even a ripple as history churns on.

And in that space where Holiday work would happen, in a single room, with all the players chatting and arguing, one probably missed the significance that the media would never house that number of shining souls in a single boat as it did then because the media itself has lost all its shine.

That friendship we had

It's interesting that you saw in me a dedicated journalist but you also saw something else. You felt I had no respect for conventions, discipline, structure and everything else that makes up the productive world. You felt that I had little or no respect for the world and its ways of managing itself. As you once said, "you simply don't respect anything which everyone else does and that includes politics. You are the ultimate anarchist."

This is partly true because I have no stake in the system and no belief in the existing structure. You did have confidence bordering on faith in the idea that human beings were capable of doing good and the structure could be used for the greater good of all. I disagreed but you were among all who did hold faith as one of the finest.

When I left the BBC because I was tired of listening to and reporting the fabrications and fictions passed on by the politicians as news, you disapproved and said, "it's important to remain part of the system and keep working. Who will listen to you now? "Nobody did but it didn't matter to me and doesn't now either. To Harun bhai it did.

The Sangbad interregnum

He believed in the system, which is why he agreed to give up his years of work in the English media and join daily Sangbad. There was talk as to why he was made the boss of a leading Bangla daily albeit an ailing one but it didn't matter. He took Sangbad to its best ever days and touched more readers and sales figures than it had ever before. In so many ways, it was his way of proving to the Bangladeshi skeptics who ever doubted his capacity to run a house independently. And he did it successfully. That fact may be forgotten but will not be erased from history.

Final days

After Sangbad, you ended up in The Financial Express, perhaps the best run media house in town. Moazzem Bhai was its founder Editor and you joined hands, almost in retirement from mainstream political media. People have written about your skill and wisdom but your health was weakening, your heart perhaps more so and one day you just drifted away from what was your way of life.

I didn't keep in touch as I am wont to but I would learn from your family members about your fading years and one day you were no more.

Sadness, mourning and such words are meaningless when it comes to any stellar member's departure of your generations. You were the bridging generation between the years before and after and held on strongly to both and made it happen. You believed in the simplest possible terms and worked selflessly tinged with an absurd sense of idealism. It didn't and doesn't matter what others did, What does is what you did. And you did better what history demanded and oh-so well.

Farewell Harun bhai