I want to be GOOD - Part I

I want to be GOOD- who will help me?

Week-long pressure points

It is Wednesday. As soon as Mom returns from office she asks “Bring today’s Unit Test paper”. “Why did you leave out this question for which I prepared you so thoroughly yesterday, spending all my energy?” “Out of the rest God knows how many slips you have committed (I thought God has better things to do than monitor my mathematics unit test paper!). If this is the status in the Unit Test, I shudder to think of the final examination for which you have to study the entire syllabus”.

It is Friday. It is the turn of Meera, my elder sister to turn on the heat. “Did you clear the speaking assignment? Remember that I passed Diplôme Supérieur with “Tres Bien” grading and you are expected to maintain the standard that I have set”.  She was referring to my French class where I had to watch a French movie and reproduce the dialogue. I have mastered written French but spoken French is a nightmare.

It is Sunday. Father is worried that my state of preparedness for the Fifth level Trinity examination in Western Classical music is inadequate. The investment in the high-end keyboard doubling as a low-end piano and the astronomical per hour fees to the tuition master are not producing the expected returns. Sundar who started a full year after me has overtaken me and is now ready for the Sixth level examination. “The differentiating factor is hard work”, I am admonished.

It is Tuesday. Uncle has come all the way from a distant suburb to comment on my backhand volley in tennis. My parents did not heed his advice to enroll me in Krishnan’s academy but put me in a local coaching class.  From the 98,765^th world rank I now hold, reaching the 100^th rank in the next 3 years looks as far away as Mars.

It is Thursday. The teacher is wondering whether she erred in nominating me as the school representative in the inter-school quiz contest to be held the next day. “Our school has been the winner for the last 4 consecutive years. Are you in a position to retain the status? Take care to read tomorrow’s newspaper as this quiz master has a tendency to ask a question from that day’s paper”

On Saturday, the friends want to be innovative at Bala’s birthday bash. No pizzas, no ice-creams. It is Indonesian cuisine this time. No 10 PM curfews. It is sleep-in this time and music at 10KW until 4 AM.

In the midst of the above, the Social Studies Project work due for submission on Monday remains unfinished.

To be Good is out of fashion

Parents, relatives, teachers, and friends turn out as stakeholders in Atul’s ambitions and agenda of progress. Concepts, definitions, methods, tools, equipment, coaches, time schedules, figures of merit, benchmarking schemes are all in place. Has anyone, at any time, asked Atul about his progress in being “GOOD”? Has anyone discussed the definition, the interpretations, the methods, the tools and the measure of achievement in being good?

The very concept and the practice of the art of being good sound bizarre and weird. The notion of trying to be a ‘good person’ invokes a sense of fear because of the jargon associated with being good. The vocabulary sounds threatening – ethics, morality, piety, solemnity, forbearance, rituals, renunciation, righteousness, conduct, character, manners, humility, respect, truthfulness, etiquette and so on. The threat is increased by the use of Sanskrit words such as Dharma, Karma, Ahimsa, Satya, Moksha, Naraka and so on.

As an individual everyone has some goals in life; organizations call it their Mission, Vision statements. Would any organization have as its mission statement a phrase such as “to be a customer unfriendly organization” or “to continue to produce shoddy products”? Similarly would any individual have as his personal mission in life to be the wickedest person in his society?

If your ambition in life is to fight hereditary diseases, you need to study genetics and anatomy; you need laboratory facilities where you can experiment with cell mutations and so on. If your life’s mission is to be good, where do you get help in terms of concepts, rules, methods, tools and gradation? Where is the body of knowledge and a course where you can enroll to earn a graduate degree in being good? What laboratory facility does one need in conducting the experiment to be good?

Parents shy away from referring to the need to be good probably because they are not sure whether they will pass the test themselves. Teachers feel that this is the responsibility of the parents and shirk their responsibility.  Peers will dote on you and even envy you if you tell them that you are improving on your backhand volley in tennis. Try telling your friend that you are working on your character, and you will receive quizzical looks and even be thought insane. It’s an indication of just how out of favor the mission of being good has become.  Popularity seems to be inversely proportional to being good. Look at the TV and newspapers. Criminals hog the headlines whereas good Samaritans do not get any coverage.

Role of religions

There is however one arm of the society that shows interest and even considers it its responsibility to disseminate applied ethics – it is called religion. Different religions may have disagreements with their definitions of goodness or on the practical implementation aspects of their own beliefs; however, religions do not stop trying to encourage their followers to be good. They give their followers commandments and rituals, they deliver them sermons and ask them to recite prayers and hymns.

Even for a life-long atheist, there is something interesting about the processes and efforts that religion indulges in. Is there anything we can learn from these efforts? The standard answer would be that there is nothing to be learnt, because religious morality is perceived to come from God, who does not figure in the atheist’s dictionary. Psychologically whenever God is mentioned people lift their heads to the skies implying that God resides somewhere up there. We can however delink God from morality because the main motivation for norms of proper behavior came from the pragmatic need of our earliest communities to control their members’ tendencies towards violence, and to foster in them habits of harmony and forgiveness.

How does the institution of Religion help us with a syllabus, a learning pedagogy and an evaluation system for a course on “goodness”? It acts in several layers; some of these layers may not be relevant to a student. An approach that will appeal to the rational mind is the one through anecdotes interspersed in its literature which we call scriptures. One can read them with reverence or one can read them purely for their literary excellence or for their imaginative story line (as we read Harry Potter). They could be viewed as historical facts or imaginative fiction. In any case they present typical scenarios of dilemma and how the actors behaved under those circumstances in their time and in that place and context. They do not sermonize that YOU should act exactly the same way when faced with an identical dilemma today. The scriptures do not provide one-size-fit-all solutions. They present several options for you to choose the one that best suits you. This aspect of scriptures has not been properly understood and that explains the aversion toward reading the scriptures. 

                                                                                    ……… to be continued