Adda: "Selling Eye" took over my thought

Sunday, April 24, 2005

"Selling Eye" took over my thought

"Desperate mother puts eye on sale” from Bangladesh has attracted Reuters coverage for oddly enough news. Shefali Begum has not sold her eye. In the mean time, her story got huge hit in the news even she had not asked to sell her 2½ year old daughter, had not injured or killed anyone, had not abandoned her child. She has tried to sell one of her eyes for money, for subsistence- a huge denial of social darwinism. She is definitely pursuing her freedom of choice for the pursuit of happiness and success. She has taken her own intiative in providing for her needs-the definining idea of individualism.

Only thing she has forgotten to realize in a world where she is trying to sell eye for money, a lot of eyes with abundance and affluence have already been sold to personal lust, greed and growth. Unfortunately, these eyes don’t see her plight and anguish, and don’t feel her pain. This news is very sad and odd for us. A lot of discussions are now going on in the message borad to reach her, to help her and to be humane afterall again. With an oddly enough news, she may have opened a lot of eyes and insights for the time being as we feel very embarassed and humiliated.

As I was reading one of my favorite writers, Michael Harrington’s The Other America, Poverty in the United States of America, I found, “...the poor are politically invisible. It is one of the cruelest ironies of social life in advanced countries that the dispossessed at the bottom of soceity are unable to speak for themselves. ... They (the poor) are without lobbies of their own; they put forward no legislative program. As a group, they are atomized. They have no face; they have no voice”. Shefali Begum from Bangladesh, a developing country from South Asia, has come up in the news media with a new face and voice of desperation that only resides in poverty.

“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds” (Keynes).

# posted by Addabaj : 10:35 PM

Comments:

Did she sell her eye? That's horrible to have to choose between your eye and your children's life, but I can understand that it is far worse to lose a child than an eye.

# posted by

Sylvana : 4:49 AM GMT+6

No, she did not sell her eye. I hope, she may have received some help.

# posted by

Addabaj : 7:46 AM GMT+6

Heh heh....life in BD today is so mechanical, so utterly non-humanoid that such incidents just amuse me.What if she had sold here eyes? Next year we'd have still voted some crap head political party (well all of them are) and then again some dad/mom/sis/bro would have sold/lost his/her intestines/eyes/genitals/pride
/verginity....

Things here in Bangladesh have worsened to such extent that those who are allowed to prosper these days are miscreants and those who dont are either geeks with no practical knowledge or too-much-naive dudes.So this is the irony of poverty, the stench of reality....someone from canada may think thats horrible...but i think its grosely amusing, ironically farcefull..why? Because in a contry where so much was bewtowed upon by god , now the only thing that remains is the exoskeleton of dying panaroma, the vauge remenange of an un-earthly beauty....

then again, what would a bengali-medium student like me from Notredame college living in lalbagh know about such things right?

[PS:SOUTHPARK RULZ]

# posted by