Deserving the Desired

DHAKA, BANGLADESH: In his search for enlightenment Buddha discovered that all human sufferings were rooted in desire. The human desire for this and that brings forth unlimited sufferings along the way. The more we desire, the more tribulations our life encounters. The fact of the matter is very few of us look for enlightenment as Buddha did. We are often accustomed to the ordinary way of life. That is why we even give very little importance to discover the true purpose of life—the precious thought of abandoning self-interest for the sake of serving others never comes to our mind. Our typical superficial thoughts can’t break the mold of mediocrity. We entangle inside the hackneyed conventionality and always think the way others told us to think in all these days. How many of us ever thought that we genuinely don’t need a prestigious job, fancy car, big house, bank balance or other modern amenities to make life so-called better and comfortable? Nowadays finding people who don’t yearn for these material possessions is very rare. 

Is there anything wrong to run after material possession? Hedonists find their pleasure in consumption and luxury brought to them by material ownership while ascetics believe in self-denial by avoiding such possession. And the largest portion of us stuck in between these two extreme groups and desire a lot of things without justifiably deserving the desired objects. We rarely ask the questions: do we actually deserve what we desire?  Or, are we really ready to devote ourselves to gain our desired objects? Attaining something great requires utmost dedication, hell-bent determination and relentless sacrifice. The bigger the ambitions, the more resolution often requires to make things happen. It means desiring something is very easy. Anybody can desire anything. But preparing yourself to get your desirables makes the difference end of the day. Many of us desire big but ironically our dedication to achieving this is very small—the tenacity and arduousness required to get the big things in our fist hardly go with our undynamic traits. That’s when things start to fall apart gradually.   

The most celebrated and modelled people of our times have built their lofty statures not just by desiring but by many years of hard work, firmness and dedication which make them the most deserving candidates of success among all their contemporaries. Consider the sports stars: wishing to be someone like Michel Jordan, Tiger Woods, Mohammed Ali, Sachin Tendulkar, Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi is not enough. Modelling their success, possessing the very mindset to replicate their hard work and in fact practically making these happen is critically important to deserve the same enrichment they gained in their sporting career. Likewise, for an engineering candidate aspiring to get an entry in Caltech or MIT isn’t just the matter of desire rather it’s about preparing him/herself as a deserving candidate to get admission call. Similarly, desiring to be a Harvard or Wharton MBA holder isn’t enough but the mindset to exert maximum dedication to get a place in these highly competitive programs and actually preparing oneself for that enhances the chance of the desired outcome. Suppose you aim to outshine and want to be a noble laureate in your respective field but you aren’t arduous and passionate for the wisdom noble laureates often have for their discipline. In such a case, shackling the rein of your desire is always better.  

We have a tendency to make desire out of a vacuum, and oftentimes we indulge in some kind of fantasy to fulfil our desire. But life is tantamount to practicality—the force of reality drives away fantasy that nests in our mind. We can desire a six-figure salary or a promotion every two years from our employer. Nobody will bar us making such desire. However, some self-reflections are always necessary to root ourselves to ground reality—do we really deserve or are we really capable to add much value in the organization that our employer will offer us 100k salary every month or exalt us every two years? That is being valuable or deserving candidate matters to conform with the desire we make. Otherwise, our desire will drift in the air of fantasy all the time and we will live in disappointment forever. Professional coach Tony Robbins said is well: be so valuable that your contribution is felt within the organization and your credentials matter to your employer. And for that reason, we need to prepare ourselves continuously and evolve with demanding skills and capabilities that nobody can dare to deny.  

Deserve before you desire—I came to know this axiom on my way to the workplace one day. It was painted nicely among many more insightful proverbs on BKTTC boundary-wall located nearby city’s Technical intersection. I have shared the inner meaning of this thought-provoking statement with my students multiple times in the classroom. My message to my students is simple: prepare yourselves as deserving candidates to materialize your dream in life and your ambition for the future.  Success has no shortcut. It may sound like cliché but it is undeniably true. Renowned journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell said you have to spend around 10 years or approximately 10000 hours if you want to be an expert in any particular field. Though these figures aren’t empirically proved, they purposefully estimate the magnitude of dedication required to be a big shot in life.  If you have a dream, be ready to work hard to live it. If you have a desire, be ready to work hard to deserve it. Buena suerte! 


By
Md Azzajur Rahman
Date: 24-05-2020

Is everything up for sale?

DHAKA, BANGLADESH: Can we sell everything? The answer seems, yes, we can sell. Well, let's think about the basic needs of human beings: food, clothing, shelter, education, and medication. How many states in the world can ensure these basic necessities for their citizens? The number is absolutely dismal except for some welfare states mainly located in the northern hemisphere of the earth. Rather than meeting these basic needs for free or reaching within the doorsteps of ordinary people, what we often see is that there are big industries that have been built to trade these basic needs. For example, we trade every single food item in the marketplace—from noodles to cookies all are available for sale; we have built luxurious shopping malls and fashion outlets everywhere to meet our sartorial needs; there are highly secured, upscale and aristocratic neighborhoods thanks to massive real estate industry; quality education from primary to tertiary is now under the reign of private institutions; obviously medicine and medication are not free as giant pharmaceuticals and private hospitals are dominating the scene. So, the point is simple: if you have money, you can afford everything you need and there are people to avail them for you in exchange for your bucks. Someone's income is someone's expenditure and vice-versa. That is how the market economy works and which is why perhaps we have put all our necessities up for sale. 

Remember: Not everything is up for sale

Is everything really up for sale? Thank again. Yes, apparently everything is up for sale. We have become so accustomed to the market economy adopted by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and later on bolstered by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton that this economic system has penetrated into every sphere of our lives. It has ramified in all layers of our social fabric and gradually expanded its circumference. This extraordinary evolution of the market economy has turned to market society because nowadays we can trade literally everything even the more unusual kinds of stuff. People are selling their wombs touting the concepts called surrogacy, aren't they? Even selling sperm is also good business. Those who have watched the movie called Vicky Donor know that already and storyline of this movie hasn't been created out of a vacuum. Somewhere in the world, some people are doing it. What about childcare which we can outsource just by spending little money! Selling is becoming ubiquitous, right? Let's think about body organs. Aren't people selling them for handsome bucks? Yes, there are people doing it legally and unabatedly. Even your favorite car, bike, extra room in the house, empty garage, expensive toolbox, and stuff like these can be your earning source by selling the utility of these assets to interested others who are willing to buy. That is how a concept called sharing economy powered by the internet is now very popular. Nowadays, you can even hire professionals to simply cuddle you if you just need that warmth of being embraced. What about hiring someone to stand for you in long queues maybe to pay utility bills, train tickets, bus tickets, movie tickets, sports tickets etc.? Both buyers and sellers are available to do these emerging services. What about creativity, can we sell it too? Yes, we can. To commoditize our creativity and probably for sale at eye-popping prices, we have created terms like intellectual property rights, copyrights, patents and whatnot. Even for emotionally sensitive activities such as finding life partners and soul mates, we subscribe to matrimonial sites and install hot-favorite apps from app stores. So, it feels like emotional tasks are also up for sale and subscription. Think about contract marriage; the conventional way to form a family institution has also become a traded commodity. These days, the sale is an omnipresent concept. And the ability to sell is a highly sought-after, coveted skill by employers and they desperately look for it in job aspirants. 

Many countries around the world adopted the market economy for organizing productive activities and for the greater good. However, since the last couple of decades, we have moved way too much towards market society—it's a way of life in which market values intrude into every aspect of human endeavor. We have ingrained the mindset that we can sell anything or it's very much possible to put everything up for sale. Many of these undertakings have seen mentioned in the aforementioned examples. These instances are not exhaustive. There are many more examples out there. Modern warfare can be outsourced—you can hire a mercenary army to fight for you against your enemies on the battlefield. It happened during the war in Afghanistan. You can hire private security forces for your own safety. The rampant rise of private security firms is an example. Even to be a state head, to win an election, you have to buy public consensus by fair means or foul. Billions of dollars are spent in the election campaign. But why? It's to manipulate and buy our free will and democratic rights deceitfully. And we are ready to be deceived in exchange for money, aren't we? So, democratic values are also up for sale. There are even machinations in place to rig an election result and the stakeholders involved are doing this for personal gains—selling conscience in exchange for money. Money can win an election for you these days. So true! Once elected then there are different interest groups and crony lobbyists to influence policymakers. It's a complex cycle in which transactional relationship builds up to reap respective benefits. It is an unprecedented tendency to commoditize even the very unusual aspects of our societal life. The rituals performed when life ends are now commodity objects. Funeral, cremation, or burial can be done by hired professionals, and graveyard plots are for sale thanks to the innovative business idea of entrepreneurs resolving land scarcity problems in crowded busy cities. Then there is a shadow economy where all sorts of illicit activities—human trafficking, prostitution, smuggling, drugs, cyber-crime, contract cheating, heist, murder—are perpetrated for money. Even after facing an existential threat, we don't even care for the natural world and climate anymore for profiteering through multifarious commercial means. The market economy has gone too far and now emerged as a market society.

The moral consequences of drifting from having a market economy to being a market society are not good at all. We are putting our moral and civic goods for sale. The moral limits of the market are getting blurred. The distinguished professor of Harvard University Michel Sandal asks some burning questions: should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Is it ethical to pay people for being guinea pigs in new drug testing? Is it ethical to outsource inmates to for-profit prisons? Is it ethical to sell pollution rights to industries in exchange for a mere monetary or nonmonetary penalty? Is it ethical to auction admission to prestigious universities? Is it ethical to sell citizenship to immigrants in exchange for money or investment? The answer to these questions is straightforward— these practices are not ethical at all. If we don't rein in the limit of the market and the way things are continuing, probably one day we will put ourselves for sale. Our dignity as humans will dissipate and subsequently, our very existence in society will dilute gradually. The ascendancy of being human will be questionably disputed. Before monetizing anything, we need self-reflection and the irreparable damage it may inflict. We are distinct from other creatures because we have a conscience and that very conscientiousness assists us to dominate the world. Let us not sell this invaluable virtue and relegate ourselves to a dark abysmal pit. 

N. B. This blog post is an excerpt of the paper titled Market Economy to Market Society: Our Inadvertent Transition towards an Unsettled Future, published in Social Change: A Journal for Social Development, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 184-194.

By
Md Azzajur Rahman
Date: 05-05-2020 @07:27 am

Snippet of Lockdown: An Urban Nest

DHAKA, BANGLADESH: Nobody imagined the year 2020 would start with some ominous signs. Novel coronavirus (COVID-19) literally infected the entire world. Our everyday life is unprecedentedly disrupted. Though the genesis of the virus was in a second-tier Chinese city called Wuhan, apparently it was nobody’s bet that the virus would spread in Italy, Spain, Britain, Germany, France, Iran and USA in such a large scale, and the death bell of the virus would be reverberated in more than hundred of countries across all the continents (except Antarctica probably) on planet earth. Some other day someone was saying that COVID-19 is egalitarian in nature—from state heads to street sweepers nobody is immune to it. Almost half of the seven billion people is kept under lockdown by national governments to rein spread of the virus. Social distancing is the new norm among inherently social human beings to protect themselves from the silent contagion of this deadly virus. They say every cloud has a silver lining, and this time the silver line illuminates for the natural world as its most despicable enemy human beings are now leading sedentary life at home. As human beings are not habituated to this immobile lifestyle, that’s why may be to lessen their frustrations domestic violence from East to West is surging at an alarming rate. We, human beings, almost forgot to live a quietude life at home, didn’t we? The heydays come for the natural world as it gets a rare opportunity to regain its deteriorating health thanks to the absence of disturbing human touch. Pristine beauty of nature is coming back. When crisis hits, disparate traits of human character come to the front—some are becoming altruistic, some are opportunistic, some are selflessly putting their lives at stake to treat others, some are becoming violent out of frustration and some are abhorrently abandoning their virus-infected near and dear ones for their own safety. Gosh, unimaginable development of so many poignant events!

Beauty of Nature 

Amid all these atrocities, animosities, benevolence, altruism, frustration and depression in the time of lethal COVID-19, a red-crested bulbul (বুলবুলি পাখি) couple has chosen to nest on an iron-grill cornice in the smaller balcony of our south-facing apartment. My wife and I are passing some curious time to observe all the movements of the bulbul birds—how they are collecting stuffs to build their nest, how much time they stay at the nest, who is contributing how much to build the nest, when they fly out for foraging etc. We are just amazed to see how from some small dry-leaf stems and cotton-like soft materials they have built a circular, artistic and cozy nest for their forthcoming chicks! Yes, the mother bird laid three brown eggs immediate after building the nest and we are a bit concerned whether the space inside the nest will be sufficient for the chicks to accommodate properly. We resigned the matter to the bulbul couple to judge, as it’s not our business, about the accommodation of the chicks. Let the parental instinct decide the future of their offspring. After construction, the father bird doesn’t frequent the nest that much—probably to ensure comfort for the mother bulbul. It’s summer in the city right now. Sometimes gusty winds day and night disturb the urban bulbuls—it’s somewhat troublesome particularly for the mother bird when it remains busy to hatch the eggs. We are wondering how judicious the birds are as they have chosen a place which is quite protected from the calamity outside. It’s so thought provoking to observe that the judgment of parents seems identical both in the natural and material worlds. Now we are eagerly waiting for the chicks to come out (it usually takes approximately fourteen days of regular hatching). By the time the chicks become mature birds, able to fly, probably the world would get rid of the curse of COVID-19.


There are myriad of statements out there regarding the invention of COVID-19 vaccine, which is the best possible means to get our life back to normalcy. However, the time it will take to invent an effective vaccine is uncertain; nobody knows the exact time it will take to come up with a permanent remedy. And this uncertainty has put the global community in infinite tribulations. Isn’t is heart-wrenching to think that even after so much advancement in every sphere of life, we are nakedly unprepared to face-off a dreadful pandemic like COVID-19. Let's wish for a time when we will be able to win our fight against this frightening virus, start to socialize again, human spirit will be back to its peak, we will realize to let the natural world as it is and of course, the bulbul chicks nested in our place will sprout their wings to enjoy gentle breeze in the heart of the blue sky.  

By:
Md Azzajur Rahman
Date: 15 April 2020 @05:14 pm