You have to be honest in life, even if you accept hardships and sacrifices. Honesty has a different fragrance. Justice has a different kind of power and respect. Your colleagues working in the same office have legal and illegal income from many sectors, while your only assets are salary – this will test your life and livelihood, but there will be blessings in life. Illegal income is cursed by people, cursed by the Creator. Therefore, you can never be happy in life with money earned through illegal means. The money you use to buy medicine for your parents, the money you use to buy milk for your child is forbidden – can you imagine the consequences? Using illegal money will not make a person wealthy, but will go astray. That child will start the beginning of disrespect and humiliation from you. You wore very good clothes with the money of bribery and corruption, arranged for a nice residence, played with the magic of oil and salt or built a mountain of wealth! Still expecting a safe life after that? All of this will be a burden for you, it will be poison. Illegally acquired wealth first creates anxiety in the human brain and takes away sleep. You cannot sleep even when lying on a soft bed, all delicious foods have become forbidden for your body during your lifetime – what will happen to money? How long can you keep wealth alive? You live a glamorous life outside but there is no relationship in marriage, trust has already been destroyed or your children are living a reckless life – will you still measure the success of life by wealth? If in your old age you have to worry about eating rice in prison, and everyone you know knows you as a bad person, then there is no chance to call that life beautiful. The life of a scavenger or laborer is much better than this. Much more honorable.
You cannot do any wrong that harms someone else in any way. If you cheat the rights of a servant, if you waste the state deposit, even God has not kept the opportunity to forgive you. Those who have caused limitless suffering in the world by illegally confiscating files and seizing land and assets will automatically forgive you – don’t think of people as so great. The so-called educated citizens are causing more harm to the state than the illiterate and semi-educated. More than the educated unemployed, dishonest employees, unethical businessmen, and unpatriotic politicians with unprincipled and unpatriotic masks are shaking the foundation of the society and state. You can selectively separate honest people from those you know, from those holding responsible positions in the state. It is sad but true, the number of people practicing honesty in society is extremely low. Many people consider jobs, political positions, and power as licenses to build mountains of wealth illegally. Seeing their tendency to accumulate wealth, it seems that they have taken a lease on the country. Again, many of them are getting away with corruption and supporting injustice by exploiting loopholes in the law. However, the eyes of this world can be avoided, but the scales of the Hereafter are a symbol of justice. How many of the wealthy in our family, relatives or society are living only on salary money? How much wealth is possible to build with the salary money fixed by the state, with the profits of a policy-supported business? Yet some have built hundreds of thousands of crores of taka in their middle years, some do small businesses or become small leaders. At least government employees do not have the opportunity to do much by earning legally. They are supposed to educate their children, eat dal and rice and live a simple life in simple clothes. Yet how many people are seen doing so much. Which journalists and editors are the owners of hundreds of crores of taka! How can they make so much money by writing and selling news? So that they are the ones who make the headlines!
Even among so many dishonest people, there are honest and decent people. We can recognize them by seeing their simple clothes and simple life. Our heads are bowed in respect to them. Due to the decay of the system from the very beginning, the respect and appreciation for honesty is very low. Since the honest cannot bribe, promotions and promotions are blocked or they do not get the desired yard. Since the honest cannot bribe, they cannot take loans from the bank and set up businesses. Since the honest cannot please, their names do not rise to party positions and titles. In this way, honest people fall behind in the story of life. The backwardness of the honest means the backwardness of the state. Since honest people do not advocate injustice for anyone, even their relatives cannot look at them in the eyes and do not know them well. Since those who are honest and work on salaries cannot give large sums of money to events and programs, they do not attract the attention of the organizers and the society does not even know about them. The more dishonest the person, the more arrogant he is. The city and port tremble in power! However, the opposite was supposed to happen. But after the customs and traditions were taken over by the liars, the honest and the dishonest are running around in society like lion cubs. This one is threatening him. Law and court are useless to them! They create rules and order. If someone protests their injustice, they hurt their throats. Even if they cannot do anything publicly, they make life miserable with harassment by the papers. The honest people in society are isolated. The dishonest are all united. Looking at the incident, it seems like, “Turn it upside down, I will eat it with loot” – it seems that the poet wrote it thinking of them.
But will society continue like this? I am among the optimists. This society will change. A little wind of change has already started to blow. The system will not change overnight. It is possible to suppress the dishonest scum of society through citizen awareness and government strictness! You can imagine – a person’s salary is 50 thousand taka while his monthly expenses are 200,000 taka! Where does the money come from? Their number is not one or two, but many. If their wealth is collected, it will be equal to half of the wealth of Bangladesh! The fate of a country where bottled soybeans are sold out of the market due to price increases and the government can do nothing but express its sorrow to the people, will change overnight – at least I don’t hope so. But honest people have to be more responsible. I will not surrender to dishonesty myself – this is not the only responsibility of a good person, but I will force two more people to stop their dishonest activities. A third-tier leader has become the owner of a billion taka, a water carrier earns 4 billion taka, or a driver owns dozens of flats. How much wealth has the first and second-tier leaders of that country swallowed up? There are good people in all professions, but the line of bad people is long. A section of businessmen are forming syndicates, some are smuggling billions of dollars abroad – how long will the backbone of this country remain straight with the way things are going? The wealth of those among the elite who say Bangladesh has no future needs to be investigated first. The government should separate their files from the asset declaration first!
The state must take responsibility and reward honest people. If honesty is supported, the state will soon turn around. The appointment of an honest OC in a police station means ensuring fairness in the lives of the citizens under that police station. If the head of the office is an honest person, the corruption in that office is bound to go down. If we can eliminate bribery, corruption, nepotism, and recommendation from the state, it will not take even a season to change the face of this country. If we can find out about assets beyond our means and immediately dismiss those found guilty, many diseases will be cured with this one treatment. An anti-corruption cell needs to be established in every department and office. Those who will secretly provide information about corruption to specific departments. The Anti-Corruption Commission should be expanded to the upazila level with offices and a separate tribunal should be formed to settle corruption cases. If we can only eliminate corruption from the state, many diseases of this country will be cured without treatment. If corruption is reduced, there will be no pressure of unemployment. The state and conscious civil society must be aware that jobs, businesses, positions, or power do not become a license for illegal work or illegal income. If this Bangladesh is free from discrimination, we will have the opportunity to grow as people of the next generation. I hope in the month of victory, the state will give us the guarantee that this Bangladesh will not lose again and again. The first step and main priority of reforming the Bangladeshi state should be to crack down on the corrupt with a strong hand.
