Candours, with the quality of being honest and telling the truth, especially about an embarrassing subject, have gone extinct as dinosaurs. Telling the truth, a ka delivering bad news, giving a negative performance review, disagreeing and digging heels publicly means risking ones future. Truth hurts. Veto someone else's project and see the reaction. Speak your mind (to your superiors) and you lose your job; if you do not lose your job you may lose face or a place on the list of fair haired/blue eyed promotables. Alternately you may remain attached 'down in the dumps' or end up getting walked over, trodden on and beaten down or sent packing to languish in obscurity or even the vigilance/crime/police nets till you are finished.
One way of getting in trouble is to simply 'speak up' or 'disagree' as they are always perceived as challenge of authority or critical of cherished programs. Costs of disagreement (COD) being high, people do not ‘disagree’; they do not speak truth. A body language that transmits that they are not to be treated some ones who 'speak up' or 'disagree' they are not therefore the opponents. Seeming to be failing at getting honest, and afraid of the truth people assume they need to protect themselves (and others from it).
As if it were a chemical reaction, when people hear truth, faces go red and temperatures soar. They feel like striking back with all the signs of defending and debating (best ideas get communicated through whispers in the hallway meetings that happen after the official meeting because people worry about how the biggies will react if they speak the truth). Truth being bare and naked not coated and straightforward, it invariably sounds crude and unpleasant to the ears. Truth is always hard to accept, most often bitter and unpalatable. Dubbed as the ‘bitter truth’, people often find themselves in an indecisive state, in a dilemma - to hold it back or to spell it out as it is. It may not be appreciated by everyone but matter-of-factly truth cannot have any additions or subtractions. Even if someone does not like it, it has to be told at times, for it does not show any sympathy or appreciation towards any one. It shows no consideration and is not concerned with the consequences that the listener would have to bear.
Perhaps because of the proverbial "say one thing and do another", so often practiced in our families, we verbally emphasize (unbearably sermonize) truth-telling, exaggerate and omit facts and at the same time tell "little white lies". Contradictory assumptions/signals about telling the truth engender nothing but dishonesty and hypocrisy. People don't like us normally to tell the truth, even if it costs them (in the long run) for having been kept in dark to use the opportunity to correct them. They like someone telling them that they like their new haircut, when what the latter really think is that it makes them look fat. We come to think of such harmless deception as necessary social graces. While lying has gone deep into our DNA, fabrication has become a die hard habit that we find ourselves lying when the truth would have been much easier.
A common man, who lives in a make-believe world, may not like the truth. He thinks that the truth-speaks are simply dangerous and disastrous; the speakers utter them for entertainment or to hurt or to insult without reason; to put him in trouble; to create problems in community; to create misunderstanding between relations and friends or between anyone and everyone or in the society between individuals and communities to be the cause of constraints and calamities. When it hurts someone or hinders progress in someone's life, blurting it out could jeopardize someone else’s life. Truth hurts. But it inspires too. People spend too much time calculating the risks that come with being honest - and too little time thinking about the rewards.
We forego honesty perhaps because we are unwilling to accept the consequences. We don't want to take responsibility for our choices. We would rather stay with what is familiar and safe, than take that risk. We lie, to others, as well as to ourselves. Dishonesty alienates us from ourselves whereas honesty earns self respect. Honesty requires tenacity, commitment and courage which we are sorely lacking. In our environment where lying runs rampant we have developed such a strong feeling of mistrust that living has become impossible.
Truth does not see faces, places, situations, convenience, inconvenience, time, age, purpose, profit or loss, after effects etc. Truth has its own nature, ways and effects. For they know the inner beauty of the truth, God loves it, the saint loves it, and the existence loves it. Even truth itself cannot change the nature of truth. Truth is divine, simple, cannot be measured or changed in any era.
Truth let out to the extent it is sensible to the situation and circumstance, should help resolve the dispute or difference at that time, otherwise most of the time silence is the best to ignore many things that may not come in way of true living and maintaining the purity of self and others. Silence is a blessing to be maintained where ever possible. Silence is not--- just not speaking in words, but not bringing lies into thought form itself.
Speaking and hearing the truth are acquired skills. Blunt questions can force people into corners where they feel compelled to shade things - even to lie. For candour timing is everything. Even if he doesn't have a problem with telling the truth, the person on the receiving end of the conversation might have a problem with hearing it. On those rare occasions when he is direct and honest, the message is got to get across.

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Lastupdate on : Sat, 24 Jul 2010 21:30:00 Mecca time
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