What happened in Dhaka on 1 July, 2016 was much more than a terror attack.
It was much more than an ISIS strike.
It was much more than a news item that will be forgotten in a month from now.
For the University of California, Berkeley, it was a day they lost a “talented young lady with a passion to make a positive difference in the world.”
In a moving eulogy written to honour Tarishi Jain’s memory, the 19-year-old Economics student who died in the attack, the director at the Institute of South Asia Studies, Berkeley, writes that the entire college is devastated by her loss.
Tarishi, an incoming sophomore at the university was on a summer internship from the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies and was posted in Dhaka.
The post remembers Tarishi as a talented young lady, passionate and positive. The loss, it says, is not merely a loss for India or UC Berkeley, but for the entire world.
The post draws attention to Tarishi’s upbringing in several parts of Asia and how her father had a textile business in Dhaka.
Remembering Tarishi, a professor of Buddhist and South Asian Studies Alexander von Rospatt said that “she was full of enthusiasm and energy and the aspiration to make a difference in the world, and she was so happy when she won the fellowship.”
The post includes her classmates, professors and mentors mourning Jain’s death, all the while talking of what a beautiful soul she was.
Jain’s Graduate Student Instructor Kelly Powell writes that she “was one of my best students: kind, smart, and with endless potential.” The same thoughts are echoed by Aradhana Sachdev, a student in Molecular and Cell Biology at Berkeley, who remembers Jain as “an embodiment of genuine kindness,”
Expressing how invaluable she was, not only in the college, but across the campus, the post talks at length of her active involvement with the International Students Advisory Board (ISAB). It also writes about Tarishi spearheading a project clothing line, “EthiCal,” all the profits of which were used to support micro-lending projects.
In a self-conscious attempt to understand Jain’s death in the larger socio-political context, the post concludes how “the challenge for all who mourn the violent and cruel loss of Tarishi Jain and of her friends, is to understand far better than we do the specters of our times and how we must struggle to respond.”
Critically examining the politics of being a ‘foreigner’ in the overarching narrative of attacks all over the world, the post talks of ‘foreigners’ in the “Brexit” debate and of ‘Muslim immigrants’ in the rhetoric of Donald Trump.
“Each of these sites of public anxiety toward the foreigner are different, radically, from one another, and from the killings in Dhaka, and yet we need to think about them in complex relation. These are our times, and we must mourn with awareness.”
The post’s last few lines express the college’s solidarity with her family and friends.
And almost simultaneously, it laments the almost hollow, quickly written words and how they cannot ever come close to addressing the aftermath of the violence.
There will be a memorial and vigil for Tarishi Jain and all the others who lost their lives in Dhaka, on the Berkeley campus on Tuesday, 5 July, at noon Pacific time, on the steps of Sproul Plaza.
There will also be a vigil at the Emory University at 1 pm (local time) on Thursday in Cannon Chapel on the Atlanta campus.
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