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Cheats, Frauds and Hope..!

By Robert Clements. Dated: 3/18/2019 12:30:17 AM

A Times of India report sometime back made me despair:
It said coaching classes in the city were teaching children how to cheat! This is what professors were teaching their children: 'When caught, never confess,' I repeat never ever confess. 'If noticed, swallow the chits,' and finally; 'if spotted make allegations of bias against the person who caught you!'
Have we reached such a state that we send our children to special classes to become cheats and frauds?
Now we know how easily fake news is being circulated by our politicians. Today, lies are the norm with all of them made to look convincingly truthful.
According to the newspaper report 16 year olds listen with rapt attention as eminent professors who are supposed to help them solve mathematical problems and teach them the intricacies of the English language tutor them instead to become cheats! Ah! Fagin you would have loved this wouldn't you as you taught little Oliver Twist and Dodger, Nancy and Bill Sykes the art of picking pockets of Charles Dickens' Londoners!
The other day I watched as a bold man called me on the phone and asked me to help stop illegal work being carried out in a complex. Earthmovers and excavators had been called in and work was going on at full speed. The next day instead of calling that man a hero for what he had done, I heard rumors had been floated that the man was drunk when he had stopped the work.
Today as I read the Times report, I see what the coaches teach: If caught, make allegations of bias against the person who caught you!
What monsters are we turning into?
Is there hope I wonder.
And then my mind moves from Charles Dickens to an ancient Greek legend: Zeus, furious because Prometheus had stolen fire and thus given independence to mortal men sends Pandora to marry Prometheus' brother Ephemetheus. Pandora takes with her a box, which she has been forbidden to open. However, curiosity gets the better of her.
She lifts the lid to see what is inside and in doing so all the evils of the world fly out and scatter about the earth. Only one thing remained inside: Hope!
Where there's life there's hope isn't it?
And it's that hope we need to cling onto as we fight a world where deception is becoming a way of life; even being taught as an art in coaching classes, and now floating round in every WhatsApp forward!
Hope can turn to Truth, when you have the courage to take a stand, till then, those profs in coaching classes and fake news makers will succeed.
Take a stand against these cheats and fraudsters of our country..!
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