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May 26, 2010

Cheating – The ultimate way of fooling one-self (Part 3)

Cheating in Popular Media:
Bajaj Scooter: Father and son are interacting about the scooter purchase. Father had given Rs 25,000/- to the son who buys a Bajaj scooter and pockets Rs 4,000/-. He doesn’t admit the same until the father deliberately points out the difference. The type of influence this ad can have on the impressionable youth are too frightening even to fathom,

Cadbury Perk: The scene is of a hunger strike and many people are shown fasting. Loa and behold a perky teenager picks up her Cadbury’s perk and slyly eats it only to be followed by the rest of the pack. Mahatma Gandhi must be turning in his grave in anguish seeing the trivialization of his noble method of civil disobedience.

Deodorizer Ads: All the deodorizer ads inevitably show in the graphics that their products clean the person of the germs. But if seen between the scenes one can see very clearly that even “Life Buoy gold” also leaves the person with some germs as if to say that they would return and we have to use the same soap again and again.

Cheating in Sports: Cheating in sports has infact led to invention of new words like gamesmanship, Sledging etc. All would boil down to the same thing cheating. The Australians who sledge in cricket say it is normal and part of the game. But the abuse of Rahul Dravid by an infuriated Allan Donald leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.

The example of Romesh Kaluwitharana lingers in the memory. Kallu as he is called gets the ball trapped in the wicket keeper’s pads. He looks towards the fine leg as if to tell the batsman that the ball has gone past him. The batsman promptly takes of for a single and he is runout by Kallu. There are congratulations all around and no one thinks of the poor batsman who has been done in by cheating. The concerted appealing of all the fieldsmen to pressurize the umpire in giving a decision is also called gamesmanship.

All this leaves us with lots of bad taste in the mouth. What can be done to arrest this alarming trend? Some of the things we can do are

• Be honest to one self,

• Believe in the means as much as the ends,

• A name earned out of honesty is worth ten times the money or fame earned out of cheating,

• Believe in building long term relationship based on trust and genuine concern,

• It is nor glamorous to cheat, in many cases it shows the desperateness,

• People will finally associate themselves with honest people, would you like to have a honest person for a friend or a person who cheats?

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