Ruminations

We grow up learning about virtues and morals from our family, school and it goes on perpetually throughout our lives. Many of you will agree with following proverb about Honesty being instilled in our heads, way before we could get into meaning of Moral Science for real.

“Honesty is the best policy“, quoted by Benjamin Franklin is something, we took as a principle of life.

We wrote passages, essays, stories to manifest our thoughts on this quote.I’ll narrate one of the many incidents where it felt harder to execute this policy than to express it in hollow words.

One fine day I went to Lal Chowk with my Mother for shopping. After shopping, we decided to eat at Shakti sweets. I went to counter, ordered gajar ka halwa* and some sweets. The guy gave some paper based token. I went to billing area, paid the bill and collected items from the former guy.Halwa was deliciously yum. It was, I guess the month of October and out of the blue, snow began to fall. It was unexpected as there was no such weather forecast. We left the place, got wet, buses and people fled hurry scurry. Finally, after so many impediments, we reached home.

At home, Mummy casually looked at both token and the bill and found out Halwa was not charged at all. It was a petty amount and I excitingly exclaimed, “That’s how ‘free’ halwa was scrumptious!”. I thought after going through so many bad things, free halwa was kind of a reward.

After two or three days, my mother told me to get ready for another trip to Lal Chowk. She took me straight to the same shop again. We ordered some stuff and she paid bill with that previous pending amount. The billing person was taken aback but my Mother insisted that we surely owed that much amount.

I thought ‘free halwa’ was not an intentional mistake so it was not a big deal. That was my point of view but my mother was looking at a bigger picture. On my part, I was more worried about catching a cold or fever due to non-conducive weather that messed up these 3-4 days. But what worried my mother was totally a different dimension. So, my Mom gave me a piercing look and said,

“You will grow up into what you see me as and I don’t want to set a bad example for my posterity even if it’s by mistake“.

Luckily I felt better the next day physically and spiritually. I don’t remember any essays or passages I wrote, but the practical learning from that incident made one thing clear:

To be honest is not easy peasy job at times, apparently it may not be even the best choice as far as our interests are concerned, it comes at a hefty price but it’s always, always worth it!

* sweet dish made from carrots