Surgeons are not, by temperament or training, great writers. That may explain why Bengali literature has never produced a masterpiece about the hidden theater of surgery–an arena where psychology, and philosophy collide.

Consider the moment a scalpel slips and a major blood vessel is severed. The operating room turns into an evolutionary echo chamber. For millions of years, humans lived as prey, hardwired to flee at the faintest sign of danger.

A single molecule–E2D, the compound that gives blood its metallic scent–still jolts our animal brain. Prey animals like rabbits recoil from it; predators are lured. And though we like to imagine ourselves as masters of the food chain, that prey instinct hasn’t left our DNA.

This is why blood, and the color red, universally triggers alarm. Evolutionary psychology designed us to startle, to fear. But surgeons have to override that reflex.

Their craft demands the opposite: when blood gushes, they lean in. With gauze, clamps, and sheer composure, they must trace the source and stop it. So to work in surgery is to battle not only anatomy but also one’s own wiring.

The stress is visceral: even in air-conditioned rooms, scrubs cling to sweat-soaked backs.

A mentor of mine used to say in those moments of crisis: “The head must be cold, the hands must be fast.” The slogan was not unlike the July Movement’s rallying cry: “Cold head, hot blood.”

It captures the paradox of the operating table: to feel the fear, but not freeze before it.

The danger lies at the extremes. Surgeons who panic at the sight of blood become erratic, worsening the very hemorrhage they must control. Those who swing to the opposite end–numb, detached, almost butcher-like–inflict their own damage, leaving patients to recover from crude incisions.

The art lies in Aristotle’s golden mean: to inhabit the middle ground, where fear sharpens but does not paralyze, where instinct warns but does not command.

A surgeon’s true skill, then, is not only technical but existential. To master the knife, one must first master the blood, and the ancient biology it awakens.

The Dhaka University Central Students’ Union (DUCSU) election, with Islami Chhatra Shibir’s (ICS) victory, has exposed two distinct camps of reaction–and both deserve scrutiny.

Game of mind and faults

The first is what might be called the “Oh No!” party. This group is bewildered, even scandalized, by the results. They curse the voters, inflate procedural quibbles, and ultimately undermine their own credibility.

Their logic is self-defeating: if Islamic Chhatra Shibir’s (ICS) mere participation renders the election illegitimate, then they should never have been allowed on the ballot.

In a democracy, “loser’s consent” is not optional. Without it, elections unravel into farce. To be clear, evidence-backed complaints are fair game. But vague outrage and rhetorical tantrums are not.

Then there is the nationalized version of this panic–the “All Bangladesh Oh No!” party. Its members leap to sweeping generalizations, insisting that the entire electorate is sliding into far-right authoritarianism.

But the facts don’t fully align with that narrative. As writers like Shantu Bose and Zia Hasan have noted, ICS did not anchor its DUCSU campaign in religious dogma.

To survive, it had to negotiate, compromise, and broaden its base: bringing in candidates like Sorbo Mitro and Juma, sidelining extremists who disparaged war heroes, and even tailoring outreach to liberal women.

Whatever else one may think of ICS, this is not the politics of a rigid fundamentalist bloc; it is the politics of adaptation.

On the opposite pole stands what my friend and boro bhai Syed Fayez Ahmed memorably calls the “cunning a-hole” group. Their strategy is to blur reality with intellectual smokescreens, insisting that ICS’s rise is just another twist in the global “post-truth” landscape.

In doing so, they normalize what should not be normalized. History offers a chilling parallel. During the rise of Nazism, a German economist reassured Max Horkheimer (or perhaps Adorno) that Bavarian beer makers would never accept militarization, and thus authoritarianism could not possibly triumph.

The Frankfurt School’s later reflection was damning: “One of the lessons of the Hitler period is the stupidity of cleverness. Clever people always made things easy for barbarians, because they are so stupid.”

Bangladesh, at this moment, risks repeating that mistake. Bewilderment paralyzes one camp; cynicism excuses the other.

Walking through the smoke

Both responses fail to meet the challenge before us: to engage critically with ICS’s victory, neither dismissing it out of blind panic nor minimizing it into banality.

Some of Bangladesh’s so-called intellectuals are busy hunting for fascism in Bengali spelling rules, in Liberation War historiography, even in Tagore’s songs–while ignoring the fact that Awami League activists are fleeing for their lives.

They have turned post-truth gibberish into respectable political commentary. Consider their claims: that a student eating at the Westin cannot represent the subaltern; that Bangladesh’s left is secretly fascist; that condemning mob violence somehow undermines “people’s power.” These are not arguments; they are evasions.

Worse, they normalize far-right intimidation. Misogynistic harassment by [bot] armies is treated as background noise, something too banal to confront.

By endlessly blurring the line between truth and falsehood, they have midwifed Hannah Arendt’s nightmare: a public sphere where it no longer matters what is true and what is not.

Their politics doesn’t resist the far right–it facilitates its rise by packaging resignation as realism.

What politics requires, instead, is the ability to distinguish between being alarmed and being alarmist. The former demands a rational grasp of root causes, reasoned debate, and data-driven analysis. The latter thrives on noise, half-truths, and hysteria.

The difference is also moral. A serious intellectual cannot shrug and declare reality immovable, as if human history were not the story of transformation. As Raymond Williams reminded us, the task is to make hope possible, not despair convincing.

Ernst Bloch called this docta spes—educated hope: a capacity to understand the gravity of a moment without surrendering to fatalism.

That is the responsibility of anyone engaged in politics: to keep a cool head, to act with steady hands, and to refuse both paralysis and resignation. Anything less is collaboration with the forces dragging us backward.

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Mikail Hossain is a writer and analyst