To mourn meaningfully is to demand change

Grief fell from the sky on July 21, 2025—searing, senseless, and swift. At 1:06pm, a Bangladesh Air Force FT-7 BGI training jet, barely airborne from Kurmitola Airbase, suffered a catastrophic mechanical failure and crashed into the Milestone School and College in Uttara, Dhaka. Hundreds of children were in their classrooms, their futures unfolding in the ordinary rituals of learning. What began as a routine training mission ended in one of the deadliest aviation disasters in the nation's memory, taking at least 31 lives, including students, teachers, and the pilot of the jet. Over 170 others were injured—many critically—clinging to life, their dreams scorched into uncertainty.

A nation stood still. Then knelt.

Unlike Yeats's Irish airman who foresaw his death in the clouds and welcomed it as an escape from a world that offered him no allegiance, this Bangladeshi pilot was not seeking oblivion. He was nearing the finish line of his training—a rite of passage that marked the threshold of a new chapter in his life, much like the students whose young journeys he inadvertently ended. Perhaps, in those final, frantic moments, he fought to veer away from the school, to steer clear of the children's sanctuary, sacrificing himself instead. But the ejection came too late, the sky too narrow, the odds too cruel. And so they all fell together—he from the air, they from innocence.

If no news is good news, then this was the worst kind: children dying while conjugating verbs, drawing maps, memorising poems, or simply waiting for the lunch bell. What time more auspicious than a child's ordinary afternoon? What place more sanctified than a classroom, where wonder dawns and the mind finds its wings?

Now their ashes mingle with dust and memory. Burnt books, melted backpacks, half-erased blackboards, shoes with no owners—these are the relics we are left with. The detritus of a catastrophe that was neither fated nor unforeseeable.

This was not destiny. This was failure. Failure of accountability. Failure of oversight. Failure of infrastructure. Failure of emergency preparedness. The pilot may have done all he could in those few desperate seconds to steer away from dense areas, but our systems faltered when it mattered most. The very protocols meant to prevent such a disaster either did not exist, were not enforced, or failed miserably.

And yet, in the hours that followed, we defaulted to our familiar rituals. A one-day state mourning day was declared, and we mourned. Flags flew at half-mast. Candles were lit, prayers offered. Leaders spoke, their voices trembling with rehearsed grief. But ritual mourning, without reckoning, is a lullaby to inaction. A nation cannot light candles in the evening only to extinguish outrage by morning.

This grief is not new. It joins a long lineage of sorrow that the nation has never fully metabolised. Bangladesh, time and again, has borne the weight of tragedies that were neither redressed nor reconciled, leaving grief cycles open, raw, and continually cathected into the collective psyche.

We still carry the unhealed wounds of the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse, where over 1,100 garment workers died under the rubble of negligence and corruption. Promises of reform echoed, yet years later, worker safety remains precarious, and justice for the victims incomplete.

We remember the Holey Artisan Bakery attack in 2016, which pierced the illusion of safety for both citizens and foreigners. It laid bare the risks of extremism, the vulnerabilities of youth radicalisation, and the hollowness of state narratives on security. And yet, a deep reckoning with the conditions that gave rise to such violence never quite occurred.

Go further back, and the fires at Tazreen Fashions in 2012, the ferry disasters that return with monsoonal regularity, and even the 2009 BDR mutiny, which shocked the nation with its ferocity, all remain moments of collective rupture—never fully closed, never fully accounted for.

These events, and others like the murder of Abrar Fahad in 2019, or the repeated police crackdowns on student protests, resurface again and again, not only in the news but in our cultural memory, unresolved and unresting. Each one begins with mourning, moves into outrage, then slowly dissolves into forgetfulness, only to be reactivated by the next tragedy. This cycle is not grief, it is national paralysis masquerading as mourning.

Unless this latest tragedy, too, is addressed with structural reform and sustained public reckoning, it will be folded into this pattern: cathartic expression, then civic amnesia.

The questions we must ask are not new, but they have never been more urgent. Why are flight training exercises conducted over such densely populated urban zones? What protocols guide these missions, and who is responsible for assessing their risks? What emergency evacuation plans do our schools have, if any, for such unthinkable events? How prepared are our hospitals for mass casualty incidents? Why do our air safety regulations remain cloaked in secrecy, with minimal civilian oversight?

How long will we allow preventable tragedies to repeat, rehearsing the same cycle of mourning and forgetting? How many more lives must be sacrificed before aviation standards are overhauled, zoning laws reformed, and public safety placed above institutional inertia?

The silence that follows such events is never empty. It is dense, disquieting, deliberate. It is at once the silence of the lambs—haunting, helpless, a hush born of trauma—and a Pinteresque silence, where menace resides in what remains unsaid, where power withdraws into ambiguity, and truth retreats into pause. This is not the silence of healing. It is the silence of complicity. A silence louder than sirens, thick with deferred reckonings and questions no one dares to ask aloud.

That silence must be upended. Not shattered by noise but by resolve. By policies that do not wait for tragedy to strike. By reforms that prioritise safety over symbolism. By a public that refuses to be lulled.

To mourn meaningfully is to demand change. We must not let this grief fade into the next news cycle. Let it flare, into outrage, into inquiry, into action. Let it press us to build systems in which such errors are not merely rare but rendered unimaginable. Let zoning, aviation safety, and urban planning be reimagined—not as bureaucratic boxes to check but as moral imperatives. Let there be a public reckoning of where we failed, and how we must never fail again.

Because these were not just numbers in a casualty report, they were stories. Not just students, but stargazers, dancers, quiet scribblers, mischief-makers, future poets, doctors, scientists, and dreamers. They were children who had just begun to chart their lives—snuffed out not by war or terror, but by institutional indifference and systemic decay.

To mourn them without anger is to betray their memory. To grieve without demanding reform is to accept the inevitability of recurrence. In mourning them, we do not only lament the past; we forfeit a part of the future they embodied.

And if these ashes must speak, let them roar. Let them testify to what was lost and indict what allowed it to happen. Let them haunt the silence that followed, not with despair, but with insistence.

For silence now would be unforgivable.

Dr Faridul Alam is a retired academic and writes from New York City, US.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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