A World of Lies

A World of Lies

“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything, a lie needs a million things to be remembered” – Unknown Wisdom

A lie begets more lies. There are lies all around us. From the fear borne lie of the little kid who lies to avoid punishment, the cheaters lie to fool his loved one, the white lie to avoid hurting feelings, the tricky figures to fool investors to the wholesale blatant betrayal of entire populations by politicians and administrators, lie can be divide into a thousand types. Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines a lie as lie (intransitive verb) : to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive and the noun as an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker or writer to be untrue with  intent to deceive. Either way it speaks not too well about the speaker.

But ten it is a universal truth that if you claim that you never lie, well, you’re surely a liar. Everyone lies. Well here is a bit of research for you. A study by a well-known university in Europe, after an exhaustive sociological survey stated that an average European lied at the very least 11 times a day.

The Father of our Nation, Gandhiji could never tolerate a lie. Unlike intellectual high-brows who will say they can tolerate a scoundrel but not a fool, he would bear with a fool sometimes, but never with a liar. In fact his autobiography, “My Experiments with Truth”, carries the story ‘The Canker of Untruth”. However, with no compulsion to tell the truth at any time, except the words of a Martyred Mahatma, to hold them back, we Indians have actually mastered the art of lying. And higher up the ladder we go, in terms of social, educational or cultural rung the better we get at this art. We are not even embarrassed when we are exposed.

Today lying is accepted as an inseparable part of the everyday Indian life. It may surprise most Indian if they were told that even in this age, an average Englishman seldom lies and even in the face of extreme situations we see them stand up to it with a true face. We learned a lot from our masters but definitely not their great qualities.

Our childhood bedtimes stories do not include one about a boy whose nose just a bit every time he lied. Out parents teach us that it is okay to lie if you can get away with it, and our schools do not bother to teach us that it is easier and much simpler to tell the truth and do away with it than to tell a lie for a moment and live the rest of our lives hiding it. Our friend circle appreciate the dexterity with which we lied and our society has great respect for those thieves who stole from our public funds to build empire for themselves.

Today, a generation grows up being fed with a hundred untrue versions of the same truth, fed to then by devices with no faces and confuse them with lies all the time. Our media, just to be on the side of those they favor, spread blatant lies for us to consume.

We may have passed the days of simple truths, but lies surely can’t rule the roost, forever, can they?