Blog: Debate Star
Mubarrat Wassey was born in Bangladesh and had a rough start to life. Raised mostly by his elder brother, his father was an air force officer and died during the Pakistan/Bangladesh war and his mother was one of the few working women in Bangladesh at the time.
He was influenced by his elder brother to join debate as Mubarrat saw his brother succeed in the debate world and travel internationally. He began debating in high school and qualified for the world school’s debating championship and travelled to Qatar for the first time, representing Bangladesh. Reaching this point was not as easy and Mubarrat had to train a lot: he began debating when he did not know that much about the world and during his first debate “Taiwan should declare independence” when he saw the prompt his first question was, “independence from who?” During the finals of his first debate he was inspired by the advanced debaters and wished to articulate himself and persuade people the way they did.
Mubarrat understood the importance of debate with time as he saw how it impacted the lives of people. He gives an example of a close friend of his from Bangladesh called Nebras who once asked him why he joined debating and at the time, he did not have a good answer. A few years later he found out that Nebras had joined the ISIS and killed many people in a restaurant. He wondered much later what was going on in his friend’s mind and whether has he given him a good answer and persuaded him to join debate and question things, whether life would have turned out differently for Nebras.
For university, he moved to Malaysia for his undergraduate and studied at the Islamic University in Malaysia. His friend was a minority from Macedonia and joined college saying he hated Macedonians. As a religious minority, his friend’s community was bombed by the government and he lost many friends. With time through debate training, that hatred changed where he said the government has to change. Now, he is running for political elections in Macedonia. His old debate partner Sadiq is also the former minister of Malaysia and reached this position partly because of debate.
Mubarrat experienced a lot of racism in the international debate circle. For example, one of the students he coaches on the Qatar National Team was asked to remove her Shaila while speaking, as the judge thought it was too distracting. During the Cambridge Intervarsity Championship, he overheard a judge say “if I have to judge another Asian team, I think I’m going to shoot myself”. At the time, he wanted retort but did not. During that tournament, he was the first Asian to be crowned the best speaker in the league and received a standing ovation for his speech. During the applause, one of the first few people to get up and clap was the judge who made that comment and perhaps through that, he wonders if he changed the judge’s mind about his bias against Asian teams.
For Mubarrat, debate was what helped him learn more about the world, make new friends, and actualize his love for coaching. He left his job in finance after university, to pursue this love for coaching and is currently a coach at Qatar Debate.