The passing of Amanullah Kabir takes away from us a thorough gentleman-journalist, one who remained fully conversant with the calling of the profession. Journalism was his life and putting the news across to the reader was a duty he regarded as sacrosanct. At all the news outlets where he happened to serve, Kabir bhai never for a moment lost sight of the big truth, which was that it was a sin to disappoint the reader through news presentation that was in essence political propaganda.
The modern reader of newspapers, he was convinced and in turn convinced others, was a discerning reader who could not be hoodwinked into buying anything and everything journalists put out in print.
It was this loyalty to the calling of journalism which I was fortunate to observe in Kabir bhai in the three and a half decades I have spent as a media man. For me, to the end of his life, Kabir bhai remained the soft-spoken individual I met on the very first day I stepped into the offices of The New Nation in December 1983.
At the time, considering that I was young and rather callow, it was sheer nervousness on my part meeting the likes of Kabir bhai, Waheedul Haq, Hasan Saeed and Motahar Hossain Siddiqui, even though my articles on international affairs had begun to be published in the weekend issue of the New Nation, thanks to my very respected Shihab bhai, our reputed poet Shihab Sarkar. For people like me, despite the trepidation which tugged at the heart in those early days, the New Nation was a place where creativity was a collective goal.
There was Babu bhai --- Azizur Rashid Babu --- and so many others, among whom I can count Abdul Jalil Bhuiyan and our ever ebullient Monowara, Moni who now lives in Germany. There was Monowar bhai, as proactive in the profession as he is today.
It was a team which coalesced around Amanullah Kabir bhai and all those other senior figures who were there with him. Kabir bhai was news editor. And what a brilliant news editor he was! Meticulous in his work, he examined every line, every heading, the caption of every photograph before he would let the pages go into print. Where people like me were bursting with over-confidence in the way we wrote and thought journalism in the English language was easy, Kabir bhai was a sobering influence.
That was natural, for he was part of a journalistic generation which valued quality above everything else. News presentation and editorial writing were for Kabir bhai not an exercise in adventurism but an expression of realities as they happened to arise every morning. There he was in his room all day, smoking and drinking tons of cups of tea, receiving visitors and interacting with his colleagues without any sign of agitation in his expression. Fatigue was never part of his character in the newsroom.
Politeness defined Amanullah Kabir even when it came to engaging in union activities. Kabir bhai was able to draw a clear line between his responsibilities as a working journalist and his duties as a leading force in the journalists' unions. His role as a union leader, when you think of it, was miles removed from the role played by other journalists in subsequent times. Not a shred of partisanship was there in Kabir bhai as he articulated the demands --- and there were hordes of them --- of the community before the management of the newspapers which regularly found excuses to deprive journalists of the rights they were by law privy to.
In everyday conversation a soft-spoken man, in his speeches as a union leader Kabir bhai came across as a forceful personality who could not be ignored, whose views could not be trifled with. But even in that fiery mode, he was careful about the language he employed in putting his demands across to newspaper owners.
Not for him the harangue, not for him the usual threats aimed at owners, not for him any hitting below the belt. His attitude did not always work, not because his presentation of arguments was inadequate but because of the stubbornness of newspaper owners, whose fear of compromise was there: that they would be subjected to humiliation if they acceded to journalists' demands.
My interaction with Amanullah Kabir bhai did not cease with the New Nation. At a point in 2007, he called me over to his office at NTV, to inform me that the owners of the channel, who had already brought out a Bengali language newspaper, were on their way with plans for an English language daily. He was keen that I be part of it.
I was touched by his gesture, for he informed me that I was the first person he had contacted about the upcoming venture and that he would consider it an honour if I could be part of the team he was already giving shape to in his imagination. He took me around the premises, showed me a room which he said would be mine. Together, he told me as we examined the place, we could bring out a truly modern newspaper. I agreed with him.
In the end, the project came to naught, for reasons that were more political than professional. It was a time when politics was under siege and some overly ambitious people, in journalism and elsewhere, had cheerfully begun to float the balloons of an eventually doomed and unwise policy they called Minus-Two.
I was fortunate to be part of television talk shows where I was proud to share space with Kabir bhai. A few weeks before he passed on, we met again. I asked him how he was doing health-wise. He said he was feeling better, but somewhere deep down inside I felt he did not have long to live and I might not speak to him again. That premonition has sadly turned out to be the truth.
Kabir bhai, like all the rest of us, believed in the power of politics to change the fate of societies. His beliefs were aligned to the politics of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party not in any mould of unquestioning partisanship but from a sense of principle. His respect for the convictions and ideas of other political brands remained, however, firm and unalterable.
Polemics was never part of his character and faith in political co-existence served as the core of his understanding of how the country needed to move ahead. In drawing room discussions, on television, in his writing, Amanullah Kabir gave us all reason to believe in the essential beauty of politics --- with its room for dissent, with its spaces for enlightened argument.
Amanullah Kabir goes to his grave. And with him goes a large tract of journalistic professionalism, wrapped in the values he consistently tried to uphold in times rendered mediocre by the emergence of partisan news presentation and the infiltration of corporate culture in the media world.
Let the angels take him on a journey to the stars. He belongs there.
The writer is Editor-in-Charge,
The Asian Age
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