Skip to main content

Honesty - a casualty?

Honesty is the first aspect that builds trust between colleagues at the work place. While I insist on honesty being paramount, it is quite remarkable to see how it stands to be one of the most compromised values that one holds. At the risk of being pessimistic about values, I do believe that honesty becomes a by-stander when it pressure is on and the delivery of products are at risk. Far too often have I seen honesty about the product quality, about timelines and processes being fudged underneath words. The power of a word is more powerful than a sword, as the cliche goes. True enough. Meetings and written exchanges between people are powerful reminders of this cliche.

Of course, as a "realist", circumventing honesty at a sufficiently high level is termed as strategy. So it is a strategic move when India does not discuss the CTBT treaty (if I remember correctly) in public while it is being signed. It is strategic when the Indian army misuses the Armed Forces Special Provisions Act in Assam and other North Eastern states but nothing is done to address the well reported misdemeanors. It is also strategic when Sreesanth claims that he confessed to his spot fixing crimes to the police under duress. This after he had been found guilty by the BCCI.

Undoubtedly, being honest is difficult. It is so difficult that Mahatma Gandhi aptly named his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth. How did he know that it was an experiment? Being truthful and honest is an experiment in many ways, after all. We have every intention of being honest and truthful at all times but there is undeniably an element of experience that speaks for us and possibly accounts for the dishonesty. Kids are often punished for speaking mistruths or lies. The punishment steels them to lie some more the next time and find more effective ways of doing it. Lying without being caught becomes the mantra. We become so good at it that sometimes it becomes who we are as a person!

As adults, the least that we can do is at least be honest with the mirror. If honesty is not practiced in front of the mirror, it is highly unlikely that we could be honest with the outside world. Let's start from within, let's start looking at ourselves in the face and being ruthlessly honest about our misgivings and fears. Maybe this is how a revolution starts. Maybe this is how as a society we make a beginning at being improving ourselves. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Leadership - Trump style

One of the latest tirades from Donald Trump was against Lebron James.  I have been thinking of his style of functioning and that of the "traditional" style of leadership. All the books that I have read on leaders, all the leaders that I have seen, are more or less, role models. At the very least, they offer words of wisdom and speak what I like to call, "The Universal Truth". Take Barack Obama - I am no expert on his policies or the impact that he had on the economy of the United States or that of the world. I was always impressed with the way he carried himself and the way that he spoke. His handling of particularly volatile situations seemed to always be in a calm and measured method. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, comes across as very petty, impetuous and pusillanimous. Trump is the President of the United States of America. Arguably, one of the most prominent jobs in the world and definitely a job that is not easy. There, we have a person who is cheap enough ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Great Debaters

I watched the movie - The Great Debaters (released in 2007), directed by and starring Denzel Washington. In my opinion, he is one of the best actors in the world at the moment. The movie is inspired by  a true story that took place in the year 1935 when a small school in Marshall, Texas broke new ground in debating against the top white colleges of the time and won. Like most Denzel Washington movies, the movie was excellent. The actors and the depiction of the time - 1935, is supreme. In the movie, the character Melvin Tolson  narrates a story about the origin of the word "lynching". He says, " Anybody know who Willie Lynch was? Anybody? Raise your hand. No one? He was a vicious slave owner in the West Indies. The slave-masters in the colony of Virginia were having trouble controlling their slaves, so they sent for Mr. Lynch to teach them his methods. The word "lynching" came from his last name. His methods were very simple, but they were diabolical.  Keep ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Leonardo Da Vinci - Case Study of a Genius

The first impression from the book is the incredible amount of research that has gone into making a book on a person that lived in the late 1400s through till the first quarter of the 16th century. Helped, undoubtedly, by the voluminous notes left behind by Leonardo, Walter Isaacson has weaved a wonderfully chronological and detailed story around the life and times of the arguably one of the greatest geniuses that the world has ever known. Starting from his ancestry, tracing the story of his birth and childhood, through the multiple cities and works of the man leading up to his demise in 1519, it is truly a testament to the work that the author has put in to bring Leonardo's story to us. For me, what stands out from the entire book is the pure obsession that Leonardo had with whatever interested him. Like the author suggests, even if Leonardo had chosen to write a book or had been able to publish one of his many research topics, he would have been credited with having discovered...
Post a Comment
Read more