Truth - Small Things Matter!

By Aleesha Mary Joseph  (St. Stephen's College)

What’s the first thought or image that comes to one’s mind when one thinks about TRUTH? I asked around a few people simply. Mahatma Gandhi – of course a clichéd answer! One said the first image that came into her mind was an ocean, because truth is very deep and bare like the ocean. For another, truth means her parents as they always exist. Another said truth is like gold – always pure, precious and glistening.

This aroused a question in my mind – why is it that our first thought about Truth often tends to be very symbolic about the various virtues of truth? Rather why isn’t it connected to any action? Isn’t truth connected with each moment of our life?

Honesty is an ACTIVE Verb and not a passive noun. It is something which ought to be measured at every second in our conscience on whatever we speak and do. But somehow we don’t think about truth in very small things like borrowing doubts from a friend for attending an unprepared tutorial or while forging a signature for your roommate who is sleeping during the roll call in residence. All such minute lies in our everyday life are often unconsciously justified in our hearts that our conscience never even slightly pricks us for such a silly thing! This actually questions the purity of the conscience of our generation.

As a small child our conscience was pure like a fresh white towel. Even a tiny speck of untruth would be conspicuous amidst the vastness of the white. But, as we grew up, more specks kept on falling on the towel. The accumulation of these small specks made the towel dirty. Now our conscience like the towel has become so dirty that even a big black spot doesn’t look all that odd in the dirty towel which was once pure white in colour! Our ignorance to abide the virtues of honesty in very small things in life has in fact faded away the purity of our conscience, to an extent that its power to discern is gradually diminishing day by day. Hence our honesty needs to be evaluated by zooming in the acts and thoughts of our everyday life. 

Sometimes people say it is impractical to be rigid about honesty in every instance like in our case for example forging one’s parent’s signature for a night out with parents’ permission and hence we cannot call it to be an act of dishonesty at all! But through this argument aren’t we in a way trying to redefine the basic principles of truth and honesty to suit our interests.

Our lives improve only when we take chances and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be Honest with ourselves.” I guess this is the most challenging task of our generation - to be truthful in each of our words and action in every second of our lives. But we are often very smart enough to hide the truth by cleverly playing with words in the name of diplomacy. Yes that’s the best way to ruin the truth, stretch it and go round about with words.

Actually the truth is that, the truth is always very clear, simple and easy to be expressed. In Gandhiji’s words – “A ‘No’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.” As crisp and short as that! But what we need is - the courage to choose, the bravery to believe in the nature’s ultimate law of eternal endurance of TRUTH, and an inner eye to discover that the ‘Real happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in always complete harmony!’