Saturday, January 29, 2011

The rise and rise of ceremony industry in Tanzania

y = f(x) is probably the most re-used statement in math and engineering. Founded by Euler, it reads, y is a function of x. Emerging during Form Three additional math class, students instinctively hate it, but, hate or like, it comes to make permanent presence in our day-to-day lives. The stuff in parentheses can take a head-spinning complexity to describe a normal, uncomplicated scenario.
That brings us to the blog subject: Tanzania, by the ranking in the UNDP Human Development 2010 Report, is among the poorest nations in the World, ranking 148th in the 160-nation list of world nations. It is surpassed with countries marked by internal strifes such as Zimbabwe and Liberia.
Not only is Tanzania peaceful, it also has the largest landmass among the countries of East Africa, as well as many kilometres of rivers and square kilometres of lakes.
One might think with all this contrasting situation, Tanzania would be rushing to drag itself out of this fix at the bottom of nations to climb up to its rightful place where other nations with similar blessing on the human development chart roost, countries such as Malaysia (57) and Algeria (84). It is to the contrary: Where hard work to tap the fat of the land would be a logical direction, people have concentrated in providing services that has the effect of collecting the little money the individuals get (meagre salaries for employees, bribes for uniformed officers, corruption stash for politicians, and under-priced sales by farmers) and blowing it up in ceremonies. The function takes the shape

This is the social equation of ceremony. Sometimes ago, "ceremony" would be referring to wedding. No longer so. Now we do have graduation (from pre-school, from primary school, from o-level, from a-level, from first degree, from 2nd degree, from 3rd degree, from degree mills (pacific western type)etc. ceremony might also be referring to send-off and to bereavement.
Ceremony comes with many things, therefore the Schroedinger-like equation above. In that equation, c represents any of the several ceremonies named above. Mc is the Master of Ceremony. Some individuals that are wordy have been popular lately, whereby they do that alone for living. Since the carreer goes on in places one can hardly avoid liquor, and liquor has bad reputation of damaging vocal cords, they try to avert this by swallowing raw eggs every now and then, said to smoothern the voices. C is catering. D. T. SM. V etc. shall be the subject of the next post.

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