What Our Darkest Days Reveal About the Light We Still Carry
During the pandemic, my son watched Messi videos obsessively—match after match, goal after goal, as if the world outside wasn’t collapsing. Messi, to him, was proof that brilliance could still exist, even when life felt unrecognisable.
Adults know better. Or worse.
We learn early that real life offers no Messis—no heroes who dribble through corruption, score against injustice, and celebrate victory while a nation cheers. What we get instead are moments. Messages. Fragments of courage scattered across ordinary people.
In Bangladesh, the past decade has been a masterclass in suppressed hope. Students disappeared. Journalists fled. Activists were crushed under the weight of manufactured accusations. The public learned a new vocabulary of fear: safe houses, “unknown assailants,” mysterious arrests.
But even in the bleakest times, the message persisted.
It surfaced in whispered conversations in university corridors. In coded Facebook posts. In poems circulated secretly. In the quiet decisions of families sheltering persecuted youth.
And most powerfully, in the resilience of a generation that refuses to be gaslit into silence.
There is no Messi after the revolution. But revolutions do not require Messi. They require memory.
And this generation remembers everything.
They remember the nights when social media became a lifeline. They remember the funerals of friends whose only crime was idealism. They remember the tear gas, the courtrooms, the barricades. They remember betrayal too—the people who looked away, the intellectuals who stayed neutral, the institutions that bent like reeds in the wind.
Yet somehow, they remain unbroken.
This, I have come to believe, is the true revolution: not victory, but refusal. Refusal to surrender dignity. Refusal to normalise injustice. Refusal to let truth rot.
We may not have Messi sprinting across our political landscape.
But we have a generation quietly rewriting the rules of courage.
That is enough for now. Not because the struggle is over, but because the message is alive.