It is indeed a great feeling for the people of Assam that Bhupen Hazarika, the most well-known Assamese ever born, was finally honoured by the Government of India with Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award of the country. Though it remains a fact that he should have been conferred on the same even when he was alive, the kind of love and respect the people of this country have showered on him during his lifetime was in itself something rare for a person who had lived most of his life in post-Independence India. A true successor to the tradition set by Srimanta Sankaradeva which was subsequently carried forward by Sahityarath Lakshminath Bezbaroa, Rupkonwar Jyotiprasad Agarwala and Kalaguru Bishnuprasad Rava, he indeed very successfully carried forward the great saint-reformer message of defeating darkness with light – the light of knowledge, justice, equality and tolerance. While Srimanta Sankaradeva had, six centuries ago brought India to Assam, it was definitely Bhupen Hazarika who had taken Assam to the world. Jyotiprasad Agarwala had, in one of his poems said ‘I may live in the confines of a village, but the moment I am born, I become a global citizen.’ It was this concept and philosophy of Jyotiprasad with which Bhupen Hazarika had grown up, and then lived up to it. It was not that he remained content by becoming a true global citizen; instead, he also took the Assamese people along, telling them – ‘the world would be unhappy if you remain an invalid mass in its body,’ but not before warning them – ‘the Assamese would be rendered refugees on their own land if they do not recognise themselves.’ Bhupen Hazarika sang for the world, for the downtrodden – whether by the Luit, the Mississippi, the Volga or the Ganga. He sang about the sufferings of human beings across the globe. He sang about the achievements and failures of this human race that he saw during his lifetime. He was the first to have composed and sung a song within a couple of hours of the birth of Bangladesh much before any other poet and lyricist on earth had woken up. Yet, when it came to the interests of the people of Assam – and more particularly the Assamese people – he was the first to stand up and raise his voice, and that too with conviction and reason. The way he raised his voice against a highly derogatory and offensive remark that Nirad C Choudhury had made in his famous book ‘The Continent of Circe’ in the 1960s and took the issue to the Assam Legislative Assembly, is one such instance of his boldness in defending the cause of the Assamese. It was he who had travelled through numerous occasions of curfew and smoke and an atmosphere vitiated with distrust and suspicion and hatred – be it in during the violence of 1960, the Chinese aggression of 1962, and during the Assam movement – armed with only a song in his lips, and not only won over the people’s hearts, but also brought people closer. It was he who said he wanted to sing songs that gave ‘deep assurances’ to the people ‘against the prevailing lack of trust’; it was he who said he wanted his songs to be ‘a prayer, about the glory of truth against useless daydreams’; it was he who wanted his songs ‘to inspire a hundred loya soldiers’; it was he who wanted his songs to be ‘the light of life during trying times of conflict’; it was he who wanted his songs to become ‘a speeding might against numerous barriers and hurdles.’ It was Bhupen Hazarika who had also defined an Assamese the most correctly, when he sang – ‘Every Assamese is a good Indian, and every other Indian coming from different far-away places to make the banks of the Luit their home and call Assam their motherland is the true Assamese of the modern times.’ Bhupen Hazarika will live in the hearts of every Assamese – and every citizen of this world – for ever.