Friday, December 19, 2008

Honest and Unmerciful

New Year’s Eve is coming and I celebrate it in quite the same fashion every time. On that evening I can either be located in the most deserted part of the world or I am on a train journey. One more thing that has not changed is, I make a resolve every year and I try to keep it, at least for the first few months.

For this year my resolve was to speak truth. No more games just speak truth. And to be honest I did a pretty good job at it. I told only one big lie and that was to my sister.

In the beginning I was scared that I might get in a difficult situation, I wouldn’t know how to deal with. But to my surprise speaking truth is not as tough as it sounds. I had all these thoughts that my relations with friends, family, relatives and strangers might get effected but nothing like that happened. It was easy going for most of the part and a shocking realizing was that the people around make the job much easier for you. The truth behind truth is that no wants to hear it. People are just happy with what they know; they don’t want to know anything that in any sense might sound real. They are all happy with the lies they have lived with.
In this time I have spoken about true events and feelings that I have experienced, to people and I found that those close to you have their own preconceptions and thoughts about you and they don’t like to change it at any cost so they just avoid or forget whatever truth you speak to them. Strangers are the ones who are really freaked out. If you meet someone and give them a taste of truth they think of only two things, either you are crazy or you are a dumb person. So they are the hardest to tell. Because no one expects you to be honest and so no believes you even if you are actually being honest.

Since another year is at verge of end and I have to make another resolution so I started thinking about it when I happened to watch the movie “”almost famous”. In the movie there is a character that says to the lead character that if you really want to be a good friend to people then be honest and unmerciful with them. And coincidently on the same day I watched a documentary on Jack Wlech. He is writer of some famous management books. He said that in human societies there exists a practice called fake kindness. People don’t tell other people how bad they are until they run into trouble and it’s already too late. Now this is an evil practice because you are trying to be nice to that person by hiding his/her shortcomings and not speaking the truth and so not giving them a chance to correct themselves. I have done this fake kindness in my life and every time the results have been devastating not only to them but to me also.

So for the coming year I have decided that I will be honest and unmerciful. No fake kindness. I am pretty sure that this is going to be a very tough year for my friends. All, who didn’t want to ask the truth will now be beaten by it and see I can’t help.

Cheers to Honesy and Unmercifulness!
All the wishes!

2 comments: