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Linking Young Minds Together
     Volume 2 Issue 21 | June 3, 2007|


  
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Feature

The truth about lies

Shayera Moula

Perhaps it all starts the minute you realize that doing something wrong will result in bitter punishment. Remember that age when you first broke a valuable something which you instantly knew would get your parents nutty? A guarantee that 99% of us lied about not breaking it and blamed it on the house help, the cat or the wind! The capacity to lie is inbuilt early and pretty much universally in the human development. You could promise us to be the guru of the priest of the Imam but at one point or another, you must have lied about something!

Machiavellian intelligence (also known as political or social intelligence) explains the success of political rendezvous with other people. It is believed to start around the age of four and a half when children are able to lie convincingly. Before this, they seem to believe that there is only one point of view about everything. Ah… the simple life! It is from experience that one realizes one can actually avoid a lot of whacking (from the parents of course) by some twist of words.

When we learn how lying works, we lack the moral understanding of when to refrain from doing it unless and otherwise we are told to. In many cases scolded for it! For instance, lying about studying for a quiz while day dreaming about a hottie naturally results in failing to get both good grades and the hottie. The former establishing a visible outcome of your lies and destroying you for life! Although you claim that it is the latter.

One however grows out into the various parts of lying throughout time. It no longer means making someone else a scapegoat of a situation but we tend to find a sense of 'norm' within the lies.

For instance, telling your aunt that she has made the best meal ever isn't necessarily a harmful lie (unless it's poisonous and kills your entire family!). The meal could be the driest mucky-flavored biryani but you still insist that the others around you have a bite of it. If nothing else, it's better to drag everyone else in hell with you rather than dipping your miseries in loneliness. Although the example above is known as a 'misleading' phrase, the safer one to stick to is the 'omission' of words. You could replace “I am out on the road hanging out with friends…will be home soon” with simply saying “I am out on the road…will be home soon”. Now you didn't exactly lie since you ARE out on the road. You they don't know wouldn't hurt them.

There are the regular lies that almost come through some kind of hegemony of knowledge really. They are plunged into our minds to a point where we don't question them at all. “I was stuck in traffic so I got late.” Even the 5 year old in the remote hills of Chittagong is likely to know about the crazy traffic drama in Dhaka! Simple solution: START EARLY FROM HOME! But alas, we have grown prone to it. Whether it is the truth or not we get it, we have been through it, just come up with something good will you?

Gone are the days of “my dog ate my homework”, it's the new high-tech getting hungry now. Files gone missing, hard drive crashing, pen drive not working, internet disconnection goodness, the list goes on and truth be told it really does happen sometimes!

Speaking of high-tech leading to high deception, the following are a few of the regular lies that take place almost everyday…..and I mean EVERYDAY!

* Not picking up calls in the cell phone and claiming to be busy or have no credits to reply

* Status set to 'Away' on live messenger as you stare at the screen awaiting someone interesting to talk to

* Telling someone you are 5 minutes away where really you are 30 minutes away

* That darn family emergency that pops up every time you want to miss a meeting/class

* Food poisoning takes place every alternative week

* Status set to 'busy' while you are playing solitaire on your pc

* All the lies about where you live, your name and so forth in those 'socially interactive' chat rooms or to simply stand guard from the prank callers

And then there are the lies we tell ourselves everyday
* I will go on a diet and workout
* I will make a new start
* I will finish my assignment today…I will do it tomorrow…I will do it in the afternoon...at night…in the morning… (you tend to scribble down whatever you can ten minutes before class.)

And finally there are those difficult lies that can find no alternative
* One fine day God was pleased with us and so decided to send you to earth. That is how you were born.

* I have no idea what that word means … but don't you ever use it in public … in fact NEVER use it! Ahem … I however don't know what that word means

* We are fast forwarding this part of the movie because it's irrelevant to the plot (in most cases it is)

* When I was your age I used to obey my parent's orders, study all day and never hung out with my friends after sunset (yeah right!)

It's a crazy world we live in really. Trickery always existed in one way or the other and there are the white lies that we comply with just to be formal or safe (No honey, that kameez doesn't make you look fat!). The one thing to remember though is that there is a boundary that shouldn't be crossed. In most cases no matter how fun it may be to get away from being caught, the people who are around you tend to respect you less and trust you even lesser.

In a relationship of any kind, there should be honesty. Even if your boy friend has agreed for you to lie to your parents/friends a dozen times, in the future it's going to be him who will try to keep tag on you wherever you go. Once people realize your capacity to lie to a dangerous level, they will never want to be a victim of it. As we all know, it takes a second to lie but once you have done it, it can take a lifetime to win the trust back.

 

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