GlobalVillageSpace
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Global Village Space|
GVS: What inspired you to write on this topic?
Mr. Sultan Hali: Frankly speaking, it’s a very sensitive topic and a very touchy topic. The reason why I chose to write on this topic is that I was born in erstwhile East Pakistan and my father was a professor at Dhaka University.
Although we are Urdu speaking, my father had insisted that we learn the Bengali language and assimilate the Bengali culture, because according to him, this was our homeland. And we must be true to it. I fell in love with Bangladesh, which it is called now but then it was East-Pakistan.
Unfortunately, it was severed from us, but when it happened, I had already joined Pakistan Air Force as a cadet. What really spurred me to write on this topic is that in 2005, after my retirement from the Pakistan Air Force, since I belong to public school Sargodha and we have an organization called Sargodhian Old Boys Association, whose members are there, in now Bangladesh, and also here in Pakistan, as well as all over the world.
We have our get-togethers in different places. So our East Pakistani, now called the Bangladeshi chapter of the Sargodhian old boys association, invited us to visit Dhaka as well as tour the whole of East Pakistan. They met us with so much love, that I thought that probably the scars of the separation have healed but then, in 2012, I was in the city of Kunming, which is the capital of Yunnan in China.
I was invited to represent Pakistan at the Asian trade expo and on the very first day at lunchtime, I heard a group of young journalists sitting at a separate table all by themselves, and they were talking in Bengali.
Read full story
Who Killed Bengali Intellectuals in 1971?
GVS: What inspired you to write on this topic?
Mr. Sultan Hali: Frankly speaking, it’s a very sensitive topic and a very touchy topic. The reason why I chose to write on this topic is that I was born in erstwhile East Pakistan and my father was a professor at Dhaka University.
Although we are Urdu speaking, my father had insisted that we learn the Bengali language and assimilate the Bengali culture, because according to him, this was our homeland. And we must be true to it. I fell in love with Bangladesh, which it is called now but then it was East-Pakistan.
Unfortunately, it was severed from us, but when it happened, I had already joined Pakistan Air Force as a cadet. What really spurred me to write on this topic is that in 2005, after my retirement from the Pakistan Air Force, since I belong to public school Sargodha and we have an organization called Sargodhian Old Boys Association, whose members are there, in now Bangladesh, and also here in Pakistan, as well as all over the world.
We have our get-togethers in different places. So our East Pakistani, now called the Bangladeshi chapter of the Sargodhian old boys association, invited us to visit Dhaka as well as tour the whole of East Pakistan. They met us with so much love, that I thought that probably the scars of the separation have healed but then, in 2012, I was in the city of Kunming, which is the capital of Yunnan in China.
I was invited to represent Pakistan at the Asian trade expo and on the very first day at lunchtime, I heard a group of young journalists sitting at a separate table all by themselves, and they were talking in Bengali.
Read full story
Who Killed Bengali Intellectuals in 1971?
