Memories of MBA

The older I get it seems like those moments are getting less and less far in between when you wake up to news that leaves you sleepless for the rest of the night.

I have known Mohammad Badrul Ahsan, whom I call Badrul bhai, all my life. He shares the name with my own eldest brother and is a columnist himself as well. I have met him every time he came by to meet my brother Sadrul, who is his friend from Notre Dame College. Every time he was around, we would wait for him to drop one of his anecdotes that would live on forever.

At the beginning of my career, when I had joined Standard Chartered, he was Head of Corporate Affairs. Every time I was on his floor I would pop into his office.

I would show him pieces of any write-up of mine that got published at the time. He always kept the photocopies. I cannot remember all the conversations, but I knew and that was before I even started reading his columns that he was a man of unfaltering integrity.

 I enjoyed his writing. He had his own way of looking at the world and brought that to his readers. This was his own way of perhaps giving back or just trying to change the flaws in society or the political system.

This is a picture that dates back to 2016 at a restaurant in Maryland. It was on that day that teasingly he was telling the wife of one of his friends who was present that she should help me settle down. Literally that minute the bhabi showed me a resume and I ended up marrying the same girl the next year.

Badrul bhai was there at the wedding too and I still have his gift --- a decorative mirror which I have left back home, for now. He lived life simply but there was nothing ordinary about it. It makes me happy to know that his reflections will live on, in his writings and in our hearts, which he deeply touched.


The writer lives in Maryland, USA