OP-ED: Suhrawardy Udyan, Old Ganobhaban, and the soul of a nation

History is a lot more than just textbooks
When heritage collides with modernity, the casualty is history. When iconic structures are struck down and replaced by state-of-the-art buildings, there is a sense that a rich past is being frittered away in favour of a non-descript present.

And that has been the story of what we have been trying to do to Suhrawardy Udyan. Chopping down trees to build a restaurant, to have in place what are known as amenities for people is a scandal. And it is a scandal because killing those trees was not just an assault on nature. Pulling them down was also colossal ignorance on the part of those, politicians as well as bureaucrats, whose sense of history is either extremely poor or simply non-existent. Perhaps the higher judiciary will now resolutely bury the crude ambitions of such elements and give us the chance to reclaim our past.