Mohsin Abdur Rahman — a charismatic teacher

Teaching inside a classroom is a tedious yet challenging experience. A teacher has to be a great artist and teaching might be the greatest of the arts. His main job is to stimulate his students into learning; he has to mesmerise his audience by the sheer force of his presence. A highly educated man or woman, however hugely knowledgeable he or she might be, can never be a good teacher if he or she is devoid of all these qualities. Mr. Abdur Rahman Bhuiyan was such a teacher who had all these sterling traits. He was especially skilled at crafting humour while delivering his lectures before a class-full of students. He knew how to awaken joy in creative expression.
If an old student who had studied in Faujdarhat Cadet College in the 1960s or in the 1970s is now asked to grade his cadet college teachers on account of their teaching qualities he will find Abdur Rahman Bhuiyan as one of the best rated. Old Faujians look back with appreciation and gratitude to Abdur Rahman Bhuiyan as a luminous teacher who touched their human feelings. They fondly recollect the creature warmth with which Mr. Bhuiyan had tutored and inspired them. Mr. Bhyuiyan through his moral lessons had fired his students' imagination to dedicate their life for the service of their motherland.
As a very popular teacher of Faujdarhat Cadet College, Mr. Bhuiyan used to teach Bengali Literature and Fine Arts, two vital academic disciplines that are meant to inspire tomorrow's creative thinkers. Mr. Bhuiyan knew the art of story-telling that was always mingled with a tinge of humour and the art of painting by brush or pencil that was always blended with a touch of wit, two very ancient organic arts that shaped his students to be ideal in their personal life and imaginative in their academic and professional careers. Art in any form, Mr. Bhuiyan used to say, structures the foundation on which a student learns the emotional, intellectual, and humanistic values. Arts, especially fine arts, while important to study for their intrinsic value, also promote skills in academic and life success. Arts encourage creativity in a student. A student adept in an art of any kind can approach tasks from different perspectives and think 'outside of the box'.  "Art is the stored honey of the human soul", said Theodore Dreiser, an American novelist.
Till Friday Mr. Bhuiyan, at his age of 82, was as humorous and lively as he was in his salad days. Impressing indelible memories in thousands of his students, well-wishers, friends, and relations Mr. Bhuiyan left this world on Saturday, April 05, at Labaid Hospital, Dhaka.
Mr. Bhuiyan was simply charismatic. His presence would radiate a pleasant luminescence in any gathering.  He would warm up an audience with a few amusing jokes before talking about serious things. One who ever met him would find it difficult to forget him in future. Mr. Bhuiyan was an unforgettable artistic teacher, an affable soul whose life-long mantra was to bring smiles on gloomy faces.
For some reasons not quite obvious, Mr. Abdur Rahman Bhuiyan, after his retirement from teaching profession, started disliking his surname "Bhuiyan" and felt comfortable to be known as Mohsin Abdur Rahman. Forsaking a noble family name is a very rare example in an aristocratic family of long tradition like Mr. Bhuiyan's. The title "Bhuiyan", to his conscience, perhaps smacked of a bourgeois class always bent on exploiting the working class.
Mr. Abdur Rahman presented me his 440-page memoir titled Hotath Kotipoy (Some Ephemeral Moments). I didn't have time to read the book. Now, as I have read the book, I feel guilty for not reading the book before hearing the news of his death. The book has afforded me a pleasant journey to his boyhood and adulthood memories. Full of interesting anecdotes associated mostly with his family life his memoir is like a fairytale adorned with many real events and characters Mr. Mohsin encountered in his childhood that portrayed how middleclass people interacted among themselves and with people of lower stations, how a sense of respect was instilled in the embryonic mind of children by teachers and guardians. His narrative evokes the bucolic life in the early part of the last century in accurate detail. His carefully nuanced words in plain language neatly depict the deep intricacies of rural aspirations. Nothing that happened inside or outside of his village home escaped his keen observation.  
Since his very childhood Abdur Rahman, more known to his kith and kin as Mohsin and as "Mishti Bhai" (Sweet Brother) to his siblings, was intrinsically artistic in his writing and his way of thinking.
Every year in the month of December, Mohsin, during his student life, used to publish a voluminous handwritten magazine in his own handwriting from his home at Shainpukur, an idyllic village under Dohar Upazila in the district of Dhaka. The magazines were like a bunch of ornamental pieces of extraordinary fine art, a cornucopia of calligraphy. The magazines were so lovely and so enriched with his pearly handwritings embroidered with leafy borders that nobody ever felt an urge to publish those magazines in a printing press.
Mr. Abdur Rahman's primary vocation was to paint the surroundings he lived in and his secondary passion was to write diaries where he would note all the sweet and sour moments of his illustrious life.
He was a great painter and one of the most favourite students of Zainul Abedin, the legendary artist of our soil. Some of his scholastic paintings were so much praised by the art connoisseurs that many of his well-wishers advised him to leave the teaching profession in the cadet college and enter the world of art as a professional artist. Mr. Rahman worked to imbue his paintings with life as no photograph could. He stood First Class First in the first batch of the Department of Graphic Arts from the University of Dhaka.
He never bragged about his brilliant academic background. He was rather shy about publicity all along. Never did he intend to show off his art works in any public gallery though many artists, who were not as brilliant as he was, made fame through sheer publicity.
Neither did he want to publish his diaries that were basically journals of his personal records of observations and of many poignant events that touched his philosophical mind.
Writings, to Mr. Mohsin, were perhaps like paintings. A painting or a piece of writing is a unique piece of art that is not supposed to be duplicated and churned out by a printing machine. Printing in fact desicates the beauty and desecrates the sanctity of art.
One day, however, Khokon, a young owner of Malibagh Blue Bird Printers, caught a glimpse of one of the diaries and was amazed at the literary depth of his writings.  Khokon took the initiative to print those writings in the form of a book. Hotath Kotipoy was thus published. Unless you read Hotath Kotipoy you won't be able to comprehend how magnetic a man Mr. Rahman was like. He would charm you with the real stories of his life - an eventful life that will make you smile and will also leave you in tears.
How much wrenching pain can a human mind endure? The personal tragedies that befell Mohsin Abdur Rahman can perhaps give an answer. Mr. Rahman had a lovely family of three - his wife and his two sons. The first tragedy slapped him when his adorable wife died at a time when he needed her most. Then after a few years he lost his youngest son Muin. He was left with his eldest son Enam, a brilliant officer in the Bangladesh Navy, the last member of his family for him to snuggle with. But God had something else up His sleeve to punish Mohsin Abdur Rahman further to an extreme point. Enam also died at a very young age. All the three members of his family died of cancer leaving him as a total loner. He could choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilised by the gravity of his losses. But, God was kind at long last. A very young lady named Heera found in Abdur Rahman a gem of a person and married him. Abdur Rahman found in Heera a plentiful supply of joys that perhaps burnt out all his bygone pains.
On the wall of Abdur Rahman's Facebook one of his nephews Maruf A. Khan from Berkeley, California, posted a nice eulogy where he, burdened with a heavy heart at the demise of his maternal uncle, wrote: "My dear 'Mejomama' epitomised what I call a renaissance or polymath personality. In other words, he balanced all these facets of life: God conscious, yet very humanitarian in his religious and political views; traditionalist in worldview, yet embraced modern ways; simple in life style while being highly talented in painting, literature, and in his career as a professor and an administrator; compassionate to all while being an aristocrat; maintained an infectious smile even in dire adversities."
Mohsin Abdur Rahman attempted to look at events through a pair of colourful lens to form a mental image that was always vibrant. When he faced a wonder he cried out in ecstasy while his soul would dance. When he was struck by a tragedy his heart bled while he would perhaps weep. And at the same time he made attempts to discover some intangible pains from his sudden ecstasy and also tried to derive a kind of philosophical pleasures out of tangible pains in some ephemeral moments of his temporal life.
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