Championing the New Wave

Sabir Mustafa

Launched on October 11, 1941 with only a 15 minutes programme in Bengali, BBC Bangla, the Bengali language service of BBC Worldwide has now become one of the most heard radio stations among Bengali-speaking people of the world. Headed by renowned Bangladeshi journalist Sabir Mustafa, BBC Bangla has recently stepped into a new era by launching its weekly TV current affairs show called BBC Probaho which will be aired by one of Bangladesh's leading satellite TV stations, 'Channel-I'. 

Sabir Mustafa, son of one of Bangladesh's pioneer journalists and language activists, K G Mustafa, instinctively took journalism as his career. “I used to listen to all the political discussions at my home. As my father was a progressive political activist and journalist, I literally grew up in a culture of newspaper and politics. So I did not have to spend much time to choose journalism as my career.”

After completing graduation in International Relations, Sabir stepped into the mainstream media by joining The Daily Star as its assistant editor. In 1999 Sabir's journey with BBC Worldwide began after working for several other newspapers and after concluding a brief comeback to his first mainstream workstation, The Daily Star.  

“When I first joined BBC I faced different kinds of challenges as the task in this type of electronic media is totally different. However, I could cope quickly as I had the journalistic knowledge and this is what is very important to work for any kind of news media,” says Sabir.

From 2005 Sabir has been working as the Editor of BBC Bengali service. During his 15-year-long career as the head of BBC Bangla, he has come up with a wide range of popular programmes such as BBC Sanglap. Though Sabir's audiences cover the entire world of Bengali-speaking people, he always gives special attention to the Bangladeshi audiences which constitutes the major bulk of Bengali-speaking population.

As part of his effort to provide this wide range of audiences, with more resourceful programmes, Sabir and his team in BBC Bangla took the initiative to launch weekly TV programme Probaho. Sabir says, “In the newspaper we usually get sensational news about politics, incidents and accidents and in most of the cases these are negative ones. However, I think the actual significant news is how our resilient people are struggling and thriving with their livelihood in the midst of all odds. These are the stories behind the news that have been developed gradually and thus, remained behind the limelight.”

The goal of BBC Probaho is actually to reveal these stories behind the news in a very informative and entertaining way. For example, in the first session of BBC Probaho, a very informative and enlightening story about the political struggle in  Kashmir and the effect of multi-million Bollywood industry on the struggle has been broadcasted in a very interesting way. 

Sabir says that in the future BBC, Probaho will continuously be providing such exciting stories from all over the world. “We have seen in our survey that most of our audiences are between 18 to 35 years of age. To engage this youth population we will diversify our programme with a lot of engaging content in coming days.”

BBC Bangla, as a reliable news outlet, has always secured a special space in our hearts especially for its role during the crisis periods of our country. We expect that with its new TV programme, it will continuously give us some entertaining as well as educative moments in our life.