What is the price of favoring truth?
What is the cost of disfavoring chicanery?
I am perpetually trying to answer these two questions. Even when people look like creating chasms of lies, and building mazes of scandals, I see a silver lining around. This might appear too idealistic yet insignificant, though. Then I decide to bother less about the chasms and mazes than the ways of clearing them. This makes life a bit muddled, yet I am resolute to be focused to tackling future challenges.
I critically adore the old maxim that truth always prevails, but that one has to pay with perseverance, and wait till it prevails. Amid the maze of lies, truth may momentarily linger helpless. But it is sure to emerge dominant any day. First, because it overcomes lies as a natural rule, and second because lies are doomed to clash with one another to mutual abolition. In this saga of clash and abolition, which I have seen happen numerous times, I see the germination of the same truth — that it only takes to wait for some time patiently, insistently, consistently till the silver lining spreads and prevails upon the remnants of the lies.
What you really pay is time and wait.
Chicanery is surreptitious and nasty but, once identified, its attributes and perpetrators cannot hide. The only cost of disfavoring it is you have to disfavor and discard the perpetrators. This might hurt you because you would possibly have to see your faiths shattered. The fact may be that someone you trusted turned out to be a bad egg and you had to kick the egg out of your life to save your surroundings from rotting further. The cost still is the patience, which sometimes makes you impatient to the urgency of entering and demolishing the array of vices. But you do not want to pay with your dignity which is too valuable to mess with lies and chicaneries. To mess up equals to involvement. In both cases you invite disgrace to your own life.
This whole thought drives me two decades back to the time our family lived in a village in Morang. With a surge of the immigration of half- or pseudo – literate people, especially Brahmins and Chhetris from neighboring hills and plains, our neighborhood, which had started with a couple of peaceful households, turned into a crowd of nosy, noisy, scandalous slum-like settlement in a span of five years. I wonder how my siblings and I did not become thieves and lechers before the family finally left for a more secluded place in the early 1990s. We did not deviate because our parents were the epitomes of faith and perseverance. We were so tenaciously bound within family virtues that little deviation would be visible and punishable. Or deviation would never occur.
I feel the boundaries today also, and check that the then neighborhood does not stink here. Now I cannot only be an onlooker but have a part in the intermittent, perhaps everlasting, tug of war between truth and lies. I can only work with sensibility despite the manly (sometimes rustic) fury for smashing the roots of lies.
When people begin to regard your grey hair with some faith, you should pay with humility, virtue and sense of growth. And, this is the cost of living as a good human being.
