Watch out for smart thugs
Friday, 30 April 2010
Maswood Alam Khan
IN Bangladesh, November is a month of sorrow and April a month of joy for all the businessmen and professionals associated with medicine and health. If you happen to be closely acquainted with a medical representative who moves around the town to meet physicians carrying in his briefcase cash stashed in small envelopes and gifts in nicely wrapped boxes, you may discreetly discover from him the real secrecy behind why April so augurs well and November so badly.
The mystery I have come to learn: People take a lot of cereals and vegetables during winter and develop immunity from diseases; so from November till March the number of patients visiting physicians is much less compared to an increasing number during summer season that starts in April and lasts till October, a period of high incidences of disease due to poor people's lesser intake of foods and vitamins. During summer people in our country, particularly in our rural areas, have lesser immune response to various ailments, especially to waterborne diseases.
It is no more a secret that there is a spirit of camaraderie between the physicians who prescribe medicines for the patients and the medical representatives who persuade the physicians to prescribe more and more medicines manufactured by their respective pharmaceutical companies. More medicines prescribed mean more incentives, more profits for all along the whole line.
Physicians are of late being goaded so forcefully by the pharmaceutical companies through their agents that they under a kind of duress are prescribing as much as 25 percent more medicines than are actually required by the patients. But from November onward till March, medical representatives become abnormally belligerent and start nagging the physicians to prescribe 35 percent more medicines than are needed by the diseased, because winter season is a lean period for pharmaceutical businesses. For survival in business during winter, medical representatives are unrelentingly hard-pressed to knock more frequently at the doors of the physicians, medicine wholesalers are offered heavier discounts and physicians are presented with more lucrative incentives, in both cash and kind, in addition to those free samples of medicines.
Profits and incentives make people blind and spawn frauds. At times, fraudulence becomes the only means of survival in business when the whole market is flooded only with the cheats. Not only fish and vegetables are laced with poisonous chemicals to save money on account of ice cubes, not only hired agents fetch patients to quack doctors, not only pregnant women are compelled to undergo an unnecessary Cesarean section when they are physically capable for normal delivery, not only patients are deliberately administered with wrong medicines to worsen their diseases and to aid fatten their medical bills, there are rumours that unscrupulous agents even connive with utility service providers to permit spreads of germs and viruses to create diseases.
Imagine, how many tons of money the allied industries did or can make if only the people entrusted with the job of supplying water could be persuaded not to fix water supply lines that have long been exposed to sewage lines or to blend a few strains of viruses of common diseases like diarrhoea or pox with water being supplied from their pump stations. In a country where a pharmaceutical company blended industrial chemicals with cough syrups that killed scores of babies, such a ravenous venture of slow-poisoning the populace with viruses with a view to making money from the virus-attacked patients cannot be ruled out when money is God to some businesspeople and when the government is not capable to ensure the minimum health security.
Today's business strategy is to make consumers dependent on particular products and services not only at the time of their purchases but also during their use for maintenance. The business doyens tailor their future products and services considering the consumers' past buying behaviours. Industry gurus know very well that anything free is the most attractive merchandise they can push into a shopper's cart. So, they distribute their products and services in small quantities absolutely for free knowing fully well that once a buyer enjoys the free product s/he would gradually be dependent on that and there would be a time not far away when the consumer would have to ask for a bigger quantity of the same product or the service and that is the maturity time when the seller nets all his past costs plus profits on freebies distributed and on the sales from now on to the newly confirmed buyer. There is nothing wrong in such a business strategy because that is how a symbiotic relationship develops between a seller and a buyer.
But the problem arises when a seller does not find the required number of buyers knocking at the door of his shop. This is a situation when the seller loses his sense of direction; honesty, propriety, business ethics, laws and even fears of God are all now bitter pills to him. He is now desperate and ready to do anything that may help boost his sales, no matter if he has to adulterate his products, sell expired medicines or foods by replacing their old labels by fake ones with enhanced expiry dates or shortchange the innocent customers in a variety of other tricks.
In the late 1970s I was surprised why so frequently my motorcycle tyres got flat, especially in the afternoons on my way back home to Gandaria. It was always a vulcanizing shop at Dayaganj where I would fix my tyres. One day a kid who used to work in the vulcanizing shop disclosed to me a horrible story where I could find the real cause of the frequent flattening of my motorcycle tyres. The kid came to me for a job after he was fired by the shop owner. Every alternate day the kid's job was to throw a few iron nails at the crossroads a few hundred yards away from the vulcanizing shop in such a manner that the nails could surely get stuck with the tyres of the running vehicles and a motorist would discover his flattened tyres at a distance not far away from his master's shop. I asked the kid: "Why it was always that my tyres got flat on my way back home in the afternoons, not on my way to office in the mornings?" The kid replied: "My boss advised me to distribute the nails on the sections where the motorists pass on their way to homes. My boss is very much God fearing; he does not want that people get shocked in the mornings on their way to office. Morning is a time when one should not commit a crime". "How did you find your job?" I enquired. "Very interesting, sir; like angling fishes!" the kid replied with a grin.
The easiest way in our country to cheat people for pecuniary gains is to be a 'pir' (saint) and exploit the gullible people by taking advantage of their blind faiths in the unseen. Our ancestors came across famous saints and dervishes who did never open a 'donation box' for people to leave cash in or formed a political party with a view to grabbing power. They were saints sent by God to show us pathways to serve the humanity and pave our ways to the havens in our afterlife. Most of the saints in the past used to live their life incognito and in most cases they would disappear for ever once people by happenstance discovered their spiritual miracles.
But today our 'pirs' wait for their disciples to contribute their donations in cash and kind. They are the power brokers; they look around for opportunities to engage one powerful disciple to serve another who is weaker and make some money as go-betweens or lobbyists. A few years back I personally came across a famous pir's paid agent who candidly admitted that he was regularly paid a monthly remuneration for his advertising about the pir through words of mouth. His job was to spend time in different tea stalls where he would gossip about concocted miracles of the 'pir shahib' and enlist frail and mentally weak people to be new disciples of the pir.
"The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry" said Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist, who came to prominence for his popularizing the term 'meme', a unit of cultural information that is transferred from one mind to another the way 'gene', a unit of heredity, is transferred from a living organism to its offspring. The mushroom growth of the so called pirs in our society is spreading cultural viruses that are fast mutating memes of psychosomatically vulnerable individuals who fall prey to irrational fears and absurd promises, two main lures of the 'pir' business. Our pirs are thus exploiting the gullible, who are baffled by problems in their personal life so much so that they get easily carried away by anything vague in the name of spirituality.
There is a saying in our country that "dig a canal to invite a crocodile, if you have to" implying an idea of 'inviting an evil by one's own imprudent act'. Today's internet seems to have been a huge network of billions of canals dug around the world for crocodile-like predators to attack any home or office. Thanks to www, our homes and offices are now fully exposed as a wide and open field for digital spies and thugs to roam around freely and attack anybody as they fancy.
A digital thug, in the form of a virus or a malware, is way smarter than the medical representative persuading physicians for business or the kid spreading iron nails to puncture tyres. When you are online, a malware will enter your computer to steal your login information like your passwords of your bank account by recording your keystrokes. Your data will then be sent to a remote server to be used and sold on by the criminals in the black cyber-markets.
No sooner had we been fleeced by the greedy medical practitioners, iron peg spreaders and agents of fake pirs than we have all been surrounded and attacked by internet frauds like botnets, spybots, zombies and spams---thanks to information technology, a digital breakthrough.
e-mail : maswood@hotmail.com
IN Bangladesh, November is a month of sorrow and April a month of joy for all the businessmen and professionals associated with medicine and health. If you happen to be closely acquainted with a medical representative who moves around the town to meet physicians carrying in his briefcase cash stashed in small envelopes and gifts in nicely wrapped boxes, you may discreetly discover from him the real secrecy behind why April so augurs well and November so badly.
The mystery I have come to learn: People take a lot of cereals and vegetables during winter and develop immunity from diseases; so from November till March the number of patients visiting physicians is much less compared to an increasing number during summer season that starts in April and lasts till October, a period of high incidences of disease due to poor people's lesser intake of foods and vitamins. During summer people in our country, particularly in our rural areas, have lesser immune response to various ailments, especially to waterborne diseases.
It is no more a secret that there is a spirit of camaraderie between the physicians who prescribe medicines for the patients and the medical representatives who persuade the physicians to prescribe more and more medicines manufactured by their respective pharmaceutical companies. More medicines prescribed mean more incentives, more profits for all along the whole line.
Physicians are of late being goaded so forcefully by the pharmaceutical companies through their agents that they under a kind of duress are prescribing as much as 25 percent more medicines than are actually required by the patients. But from November onward till March, medical representatives become abnormally belligerent and start nagging the physicians to prescribe 35 percent more medicines than are needed by the diseased, because winter season is a lean period for pharmaceutical businesses. For survival in business during winter, medical representatives are unrelentingly hard-pressed to knock more frequently at the doors of the physicians, medicine wholesalers are offered heavier discounts and physicians are presented with more lucrative incentives, in both cash and kind, in addition to those free samples of medicines.
Profits and incentives make people blind and spawn frauds. At times, fraudulence becomes the only means of survival in business when the whole market is flooded only with the cheats. Not only fish and vegetables are laced with poisonous chemicals to save money on account of ice cubes, not only hired agents fetch patients to quack doctors, not only pregnant women are compelled to undergo an unnecessary Cesarean section when they are physically capable for normal delivery, not only patients are deliberately administered with wrong medicines to worsen their diseases and to aid fatten their medical bills, there are rumours that unscrupulous agents even connive with utility service providers to permit spreads of germs and viruses to create diseases.
Imagine, how many tons of money the allied industries did or can make if only the people entrusted with the job of supplying water could be persuaded not to fix water supply lines that have long been exposed to sewage lines or to blend a few strains of viruses of common diseases like diarrhoea or pox with water being supplied from their pump stations. In a country where a pharmaceutical company blended industrial chemicals with cough syrups that killed scores of babies, such a ravenous venture of slow-poisoning the populace with viruses with a view to making money from the virus-attacked patients cannot be ruled out when money is God to some businesspeople and when the government is not capable to ensure the minimum health security.
Today's business strategy is to make consumers dependent on particular products and services not only at the time of their purchases but also during their use for maintenance. The business doyens tailor their future products and services considering the consumers' past buying behaviours. Industry gurus know very well that anything free is the most attractive merchandise they can push into a shopper's cart. So, they distribute their products and services in small quantities absolutely for free knowing fully well that once a buyer enjoys the free product s/he would gradually be dependent on that and there would be a time not far away when the consumer would have to ask for a bigger quantity of the same product or the service and that is the maturity time when the seller nets all his past costs plus profits on freebies distributed and on the sales from now on to the newly confirmed buyer. There is nothing wrong in such a business strategy because that is how a symbiotic relationship develops between a seller and a buyer.
But the problem arises when a seller does not find the required number of buyers knocking at the door of his shop. This is a situation when the seller loses his sense of direction; honesty, propriety, business ethics, laws and even fears of God are all now bitter pills to him. He is now desperate and ready to do anything that may help boost his sales, no matter if he has to adulterate his products, sell expired medicines or foods by replacing their old labels by fake ones with enhanced expiry dates or shortchange the innocent customers in a variety of other tricks.
In the late 1970s I was surprised why so frequently my motorcycle tyres got flat, especially in the afternoons on my way back home to Gandaria. It was always a vulcanizing shop at Dayaganj where I would fix my tyres. One day a kid who used to work in the vulcanizing shop disclosed to me a horrible story where I could find the real cause of the frequent flattening of my motorcycle tyres. The kid came to me for a job after he was fired by the shop owner. Every alternate day the kid's job was to throw a few iron nails at the crossroads a few hundred yards away from the vulcanizing shop in such a manner that the nails could surely get stuck with the tyres of the running vehicles and a motorist would discover his flattened tyres at a distance not far away from his master's shop. I asked the kid: "Why it was always that my tyres got flat on my way back home in the afternoons, not on my way to office in the mornings?" The kid replied: "My boss advised me to distribute the nails on the sections where the motorists pass on their way to homes. My boss is very much God fearing; he does not want that people get shocked in the mornings on their way to office. Morning is a time when one should not commit a crime". "How did you find your job?" I enquired. "Very interesting, sir; like angling fishes!" the kid replied with a grin.
The easiest way in our country to cheat people for pecuniary gains is to be a 'pir' (saint) and exploit the gullible people by taking advantage of their blind faiths in the unseen. Our ancestors came across famous saints and dervishes who did never open a 'donation box' for people to leave cash in or formed a political party with a view to grabbing power. They were saints sent by God to show us pathways to serve the humanity and pave our ways to the havens in our afterlife. Most of the saints in the past used to live their life incognito and in most cases they would disappear for ever once people by happenstance discovered their spiritual miracles.
But today our 'pirs' wait for their disciples to contribute their donations in cash and kind. They are the power brokers; they look around for opportunities to engage one powerful disciple to serve another who is weaker and make some money as go-betweens or lobbyists. A few years back I personally came across a famous pir's paid agent who candidly admitted that he was regularly paid a monthly remuneration for his advertising about the pir through words of mouth. His job was to spend time in different tea stalls where he would gossip about concocted miracles of the 'pir shahib' and enlist frail and mentally weak people to be new disciples of the pir.
"The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry" said Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist, who came to prominence for his popularizing the term 'meme', a unit of cultural information that is transferred from one mind to another the way 'gene', a unit of heredity, is transferred from a living organism to its offspring. The mushroom growth of the so called pirs in our society is spreading cultural viruses that are fast mutating memes of psychosomatically vulnerable individuals who fall prey to irrational fears and absurd promises, two main lures of the 'pir' business. Our pirs are thus exploiting the gullible, who are baffled by problems in their personal life so much so that they get easily carried away by anything vague in the name of spirituality.
There is a saying in our country that "dig a canal to invite a crocodile, if you have to" implying an idea of 'inviting an evil by one's own imprudent act'. Today's internet seems to have been a huge network of billions of canals dug around the world for crocodile-like predators to attack any home or office. Thanks to www, our homes and offices are now fully exposed as a wide and open field for digital spies and thugs to roam around freely and attack anybody as they fancy.
A digital thug, in the form of a virus or a malware, is way smarter than the medical representative persuading physicians for business or the kid spreading iron nails to puncture tyres. When you are online, a malware will enter your computer to steal your login information like your passwords of your bank account by recording your keystrokes. Your data will then be sent to a remote server to be used and sold on by the criminals in the black cyber-markets.
No sooner had we been fleeced by the greedy medical practitioners, iron peg spreaders and agents of fake pirs than we have all been surrounded and attacked by internet frauds like botnets, spybots, zombies and spams---thanks to information technology, a digital breakthrough.
e-mail : maswood@hotmail.com