Off raffles, unruffled

IT IS that time of year again when incredulous faces greet my entry to every Christmas party. 

What? Is this a joke? Are you for real? The usual response to my refusal to – okay, request not to – enter my name in the usual raffle that invariably comes with these parties.

Why? My response is, It’s against my religion. To cut any further questions.

Fact is, I started shunning raffles but three years back and it has nothing to do with religion. My declaration of sorts I published here in November 2014 under the heading Getting smart.       

DESIRE IS the root of all disappointments.

A truism that is so much a staple in my Buddhist readings it has become so trite that its appeal has dimmed, its meaning dulled.

Last week, it struck anew as a mantra from a friend of long ago I met after over a generation of missed absence.

Over coffee – green tea for him – I remarked how differently he looked from our happy hippie days of yore, exuding a definitive aura of enlightenment about his physical self.

Mastery of desires, he told me.

Repression of instinctive impulses? Suppression of natural urges?

Mastery. Simple mastery. Aspire not to control a desire, or an impulse, or an urge. Just go with the flow and rise above it all. Om mani padme hum…

Responded I: Om ah hung vajra guru pema siddhi hung…

He left me with a beatific smile.

Desire is the root of all disappointments. It smacked me in the face.

This Monday, I attended the annual advanced Christmas party for the local media by a telco that projects itself as the unrivalled one in the Philippines today.

Good food. Great company. And the traditional raffle to boot. Bliss, yeah.

The minor prizes first – company backpacks, P1K gift checks – the winners getting eliminated on the way to the major prizes. Some games for intermission, with minor, minor gifts as prizes. Onto P2K gift checks and the mobile phones – Chinese brands? And then there were but three or four names not yet called.

“Yahooo! Tayo na lang sa major prizes, ‘pre.” Manila Standard’s Jess Malabanan was ecstatic telling dwRW 95.1’s Perry Pangan and myself at an adjoining room. By tradition, the last man to be called in this telco’s raffles gets the grand prize. We were all smiles.

Malabanan! Boomed the caller, Balacat News’ Deng Pangilinan.

Pareng Jiss nearly collapsed. His major prize: P1K gift check.

Ninong Perry! Boomed Deng anew.

Speechless went the motormouth. His major prize: P1K gift check.

Lacson! Deng at his loudest.

Totally shocked. My grand prize: P500 gift card from Starbucks.  

WTF? All the supposed major prizes are of much, much lesser value than the minor prizes. Some sick joke here? Weird sense of humour? Perverted set of values?

“In all those Christmas raffles we’ve had with different companies through the years, it’s only now that I came so close to a major, major prize. Only to be cheated out of it. Ginago ako.” No, that was not me talking there.

Come to think of it, is it this company or is it just me? In the scheme of raffles, that is.

Only last March, I raised an issue here over this telco’s sister company’s marketing head reprising the infamous take-it-take-it moment at that Manila Film Festival of long ago and the second-coming of Lolit Solis.

The marketing madame dipped her hand into the fishbowl holding the entries to the raffle, looked and sifted through the unrolled pieces of paper and picked out the winning name. All these shenanigans before the disbelieving eyes of the shocked audience of newsmen.

The grand prize of her petty cheating: an inexpensive Alcatel mobile. Which until this time has remained unawarded to her premeditated winner.  

How can the biggest telco in the Philippines ever get into such miserly pettiness? For that matter, how can anything stamped MVP? It just can’t be. Just thinking about it smacks of blasphemy. Yes, it just cannot be.  

So, it can only be me. Specifically, my consumerist materialism that whetted that desire to get more than what I was pre-destined to deserve – the P500 gift card from Starbucks.

If I did not desire some assumed grand prize, I would not be disappointed now. Yeah, comes to mind a related truism – Assumption is the mother of all failures. I assumed much, I feel miserable.    

So, what is there for me to do?

Master my desires. By totally shunning not only the raffles staged by this telco, but all kinds of raffles. And anything that has to do with this telco.

Just thinking about it already dissolves my disappointment. And writing this induces some pleasant, if malicious, excitement…whoops.

Master desire. Just go with the flow. Rise above it all. Om ah hung vajra guru pema siddhi hung…

Now comes this sudden, if late, realization of raffles being intrinsically insulting to the intelligence, and an affront to human dignity. I mean no offense to well-meaning raffle patrons and sponsors who only want to inject fun, fun to their parties.    

Two ways to get what one keeps: 1) earning it by the sweat of one’s brow, called compensation; 2) receiving and accepting it as a gift from some benevolent other, called charity.

Where lies the raffle prize – in the context of Christmas parties and the like -- there?

Charity? Then, why should it be left to chance to determine the beneficiary?

It just doesn’t sit well with some renascent values in me.

Yes, I shall still attend parties tendered by friendly companies this season. If only for the fellowship. But I shall disengage myself from any and all raffles that shall most certainly be parts of these parties.

So, is this some kind of an epiphany? Birthed out of a P500 Starbucks GC? 

God works in mysterious, if truly mundane, ways.