Faaqih Hilmy Gozan - the Grit of the Ferris Wheel.

If you want to understand life, take the journey, walk the road. If you should fall, pick yourself up. If you should rise, stay grounded. Don’t forget your humble beginnings, the falls that unraveled your humanity. In all that, keep your perspective long, take the long view of all things. 

In the weekly GenerationGrit this morning, Cara Wong reported about the hardscrabble journey of Faaqih Hilmy Gozan (“Faaqih”), now 26. Go read it. Here I will make it brief. 

It is called Grit of the Millennials because Faaqih tasted hardship early in life. First, his father lost his stable job during the Asian Financial Crisis in 2009. He said, “I didn’t have any pocket money and I was always hungry in school.”

As his father (and family of eight) struggled to make ends meet, Faaqih and his eldest brother had to work to supplement the family. They got creative and sold clothes and shoes to friends.” They made good money going door to door selling, carrying sack of shirts. 

Just when things was on an uptick, tragedy struck. Faaqih’s older brother was then studying mathematics at a German university (sponsored by a relative). In 2015, Faaqih received a call from his brother’s friend breaking the news that his brother had died in an accident. 

“I just couldn’t believe it,” he said. “There were days when he did not feel like eating or talking, but he had to grit his teeth and be “someone who was reliable” for the sake of the family.””

At that time, Faaqih had four siblings. They were from ages 11 to 23 and he had to give tuition to help his family foot the household bills. He said: “Whatever I had, I have to the family. I didn’t really go out, so I didn’t need that much for myself.”

But after he graduated with a degree in civil engineering from NUS and is working now with a construction company, things are looking better.

Despite the many setbacks, Faaqih and a group of friends gave back to society by organising a “yearly conference for Muslim youth in tertiary education called Tertiery Career Conference to encourage them to network with business professionals.”

In addition, he also created a social enterprise “to help charities and social service organisations make better use of their resources through an app called Connectus.”

Lesson? One actually, and it has to do with Ferris Wheel. I will let Faaqih share it as reported. 

“On the difficulties he has faced, (Faaqih) said: "Sometimes I'd think 'not again'.

"But I would always think that this can't be the end - there's got to be something more (to life) out there."

He said that life is not like a roller-coaster, as the popular saying goes, but like riding a Ferris wheel.

“When you're up there, you have to be grateful and thank God for the easy time, but when you're down, you have to remember that things will always look up."

Mm...maybe one can discern a subtle difference between a roller-coaster and a ferris wheel? 

You see, both have their ups and downs, but we often talk about roller coaster as if the highs are our desired aim and the lows are (more or less) to be avoided, something dreaded.

A ferris wheel however is not just about the interconnection, that is, one (high) cannot do without the other (low), like a roller coaster, but more about their joint partnership, an amalgamation, a synthesis to mature and grow us. 

So, the lows are not something dreaded, but a season of self-confrontation, reflection and transformation. A person with a ferris wheel mindset would look back to his humble beginnings fondly, even with nostalgia, rather than look back with abhorrence. 

You see, for a roller coaster, when you are down, you hasten to get that coveted high. You want to get out of it, There is always that eagerness to rush out of it. 

But in a ferris wheel mindset, the valley is like a wise teacher telling us to slow down, learn from it, realign our priorities and deepen our perspective, that is, to reevaluate what we think matters most in life. 

Like what Faaqih said, when trials come, he prays, “not for the hard times to become easier, but for the strength to overcome them. "If you pray for things to be easy, then you will be weak," he reasoned.””

So, a ferris wheel mindset is an indomitable attitude that desires not so much for better, easier times, though they will come, but a stronger, more resilient spirit. It seeks to change the person within, and not so much the circumstances. 

Here, I am often reminded that people succeed for different reasons. Their motives differ. 

A roller coaster life views success more one-dimensional. The lows are considered defeats, and they take it hard and personally. And the highs they strive for is so that they can boast about it to others. It is a form of pay back for ego bruised. 

But a ferris wheel life views the highs from a different perspective, assigning significance beyond the tangible. In other words, they view it from a long term len, that is, one that is less self-focused and more others-centered. 

Ultimately, at different stages of growth, such a person closes the gap between the highs and the lows, and see both as lessons in humility, hope and maturity. More essentially, they see nothing as permanent. They don’t hitch their identity bandwagon (or worth) to successes and failures. Both are means to an ennobled end. 

In other words, they see both as playing an important role to make him or her a better person, that is, a person of resilience and enduring contentment. A person worth emulating.

DeepNude. Have we lost our young to lust?

Funny how my daughter used to run to us and mispronounce YouTube as “NudeTube”. When my wife and I recall that, we can’t help but feel amused by her innocence. 

Today’s papers however give no cause for amusement. It is about an app that allows users to virtually “undress” women using artificial intelligence. The app is entitled most candidly, “DeepNude”.

How it works is almost ingenuous due to the simplicity of the idea with the help of technology. 

All you have to do is to take a photo of a clothed woman “and transform that into a nude image.” The technology embedded will help you strip the object of your fantasy according to your baser instinct. You basically turn yourself into a fledgling director of your own private striptease show. 

I trust you can take photos of strangers in common places like the MRT, malls and even schools, or flip through personal photo albums and glitzy magazine covers, and take furtive shots of the ladies, whether they are fully or scantily dressed, and then let your imagination go wild with them in the privacy of your own room. No one will know. Hush hush. 

Alas, I can really hear the cash register ringing with such app that is based on the three vectors of success: simplicity, accessibility and autonomy. 

But before the creator of the app start planning for a lifestyle change with the cash pouring in, the story doesn’t end there. Like all stories, there is a catch here. It is called conscience. 

After a social media uproar, DeepNude was shut down. CCRI (Cyber Civil Rights Initiatives) said: “This is a horrifically destructive invention and we hope to see you soon suffer consequences for your actions.”

A law professor, Mary Anne Franks added this objection to the chorus of protest: “It’s good that it’s been shut down...the app’s intended use was to indulge the predatory and grotesque sexual fantasies of pathetic men.”

Apparently, and quite unwittingly, the creator from Estonia said: “We never thought it would be viral and (that) we would not be able to control traffic.” 

Never thought it would go viral? Not being able to control traffic? Are you serious? 

In a hyper-sexualized, postmodern world, where liberty has no or little boundaries, and values are what you make of it as long as nobody gets physically hurt, you really think an app like that would not go viral? 

And not to mention, a world where we can’t even remember where we had last buried modesty, possibly in an unmarked grave nobody wants to talk about (because we will be accused of being outdated or holy prude), I think it is safe to say that if you sell something that offers generous runway space to launch our most intimate sexual fantasies to the boundless skies, you can be sure that you have struck gold of the most carnal kind.

You don’t need me to tell you this. Let‘s hear it from this theologian, Frederick Buechner. 

“Lust is the ape that gibbers in our loins. Tame him as we will by day, he rages all the wilder in our dreams by night. Just when we think we’re safe from him, he raises up his ugly head and smirks, and there’s no river in the world flows cold and strong enough to strike him down. Almighty God, why dost thou deck men out with such a loathsome toy?”

And how about Freud? Didn’t he once say that our modern civilisation is driven by “erotic energy”? 

Mm...let’s continue with where we left off...and it is a cautionary word from the creator. 

They added: “Despite the safety measures adopted (watermarks), if 500,000 people use it, the probability that people will issue it is too high. We don’t want to make money this way.”

FYI, DeepNude was launched a few months ago, and the creator has intended it was for pure entertainment. But after the overwhelming response, they said that they have “greatly underestimated” demand for the app. You think? 

With that few months of commercial traction, I am sure many men who have downloaded the app must have had their appetites filled to overflowing with an app that gives them the full autonomy to do as they please with the female body. 

Lesson? Although DeepNude has been taken off the market, I am quite sure it is nevertheless thriving in the black market. 

CCRI said: “The app is out there now and will be used, despite the creator taking it off the market. If only there were a way to disable all the versions out there.”

Alas, you can disable the apps, but you can’t disable the wanton culture that feeds on the minds of our young who are openly defying any boundary and responsibility that seek to treat the opposite sex with respect, honour and protection. 

And if the desire of the man is for the woman, and the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man, then, thanks to our pornified culture, we have turned the desires of our young into one that lusts only after the woman’s body. 

She is nothing more to him than that. And once that is sated, they are on the prowl for the next sexual high. Sadly, it will never satisfy because their future wives can never compete with the many sexual fantasies they can manufacture at a few clicks of the buttons with the aid of technology. And mind you, no one will know. It’s all hush hush, until something leaks, cracks and breaks of course. 

At this juncture, it is tempting to ask, is this the freedom that we have been craving after or fighting for? Is this what it means by living in the modern society, full of technological wonders, and enlightened in every way by the fortification of knowledge that frees us to pursue happiness, progress and prosperity for all and sundry? 

Let me end with this quote for your Sunday morning mental digest: -

“It is a mistake to suppose that all men...want to be free. On the contrary, if freedom entails responsibility, many of them want none of it...The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.”

Ultimately, we as a society pays for it. The script is all too familiar. We try to do right, to prevent the moral haemorrhaging. But in our ennobled pursuit, in our earnest attempt to turn society around to save our future generation from moral decay, family disintegration, broken marriages, and even climate changes, we have ironically acted in ways that have undermined and sabotaged all that earnest efforts. 

In other words, we have taken two steps forward only to find we have previously taken three to four steps back. 

So, God help us, because we sure as hell can’t help ourselves. And if science or reason, technology and the hallowed market-driven capitalism have collectively debunked religion and they are thus deemed as the glowing trinity of our salvation, that is, our new city on the hill, I honestly do not see it emerging anytime soon from the dreaded distant horizon of our modern civilisation. 

Or, is it just me?