After the killing of Sharif Osman Hadi in December and the funeral that drew hundreds of thousands of people into the heart of Dhaka, the nation briefly convulsed with grief.Then, as it almost always does, the emotion receded. Even martyrdom has a shelf life in public memory. Ordinary people, burdened by survival, do not grieve indefinitely. Mourning fades and life intrudes.Bangladesh has seen this before. Take Abu Sayeed, the first martyr of the July uprising of 2024 that led to then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s ouster. The image of him standing with outstretched arms, absorbing police [rubber] bullets as if to arrest history itself, has already entered the country’s visual canon. It is painted on walls, reproduced in murals, stylised in art and embalmed in textbooks. Sayeed’s image is immortal. His grief is not.Today, the sorrow surrounding his death likely lives on only within his family and a small circle of intimates. For everyone else, it has been crowded out by the daily grind — by inflation, insecurity, and the numbing demands of life in a harshly transactional world that steadily drains people of the luxury of sustained emotion.There is also a harsher truth. Abu Sayeed’s death, in every grimly practical sense, achieved closure. His ma …
