Me
and my conscience
It’s
like a venomous serpent lurking somewhere, raising its hood and striking at the
most inopportune moment! It’s like an octopus, gleefully spreading its
tentacles, when everything is tikety
–boo. It’s that horrible thing called Conscience
that has been bothering me ever since granny gave me that word at the age of
seven. In school, it prevented me from having fun and smote me just when the
teacher was about to sit on the chair on which we had spilled glue. “Madam
don’t!” I shouted as she lowered her generous bulk. The culprits feigned
ignorance and I was hauled up by head mistress for the mischief. My friends
shunned me and I was getting nowhere. “Your conscience is clear, my dear, so
why fear!” quoth granny solicitously.
In college I sat through painful
lectures, all because my conscience whispered dire consequences if I were to
bunk. My friends got away scot free and passed their exams, while poor me
plodded on.
Many people travel ticket less on
buses and trains and get away with it. Even financial crisis will not induce my
conscience to permit me to do this. What price conscience? While traveling in
a bus in Bombay, my arms were loaded with packages; and in the process of
clinging to them, the strap overhead and my modesty, the ticket flew away. When
I got down, an Inspector surfaced unexpectedly, would not believe my hard luck
story and charged me a penalty of Rs.10. yet people say truth will prevail.
Why this hue and cry, you might
ask and well you might! This afternoon, I wrote an exam – a difficult one,
which warranted much head-scratching and pen-nibbling. While I scratched and
nibbled, all around me students pulled out slips of paper from under their
belts, hats, watch-straps and blouses and wrote furiously. The guy before me
temptingly displayed his answer book; I could not help reading it. The girl
next to me whispered loudly to the boy in front of her, the dates which were
eluding my memory. The boy on the other side accidentally let a printed page
flutter near me. My pen hovered hesitantly over the paper and I had visions of
a I Class.
But with regret and a sigh,
slowly I kept my pen away, closed my answer book – gave it to the supervisor,
and walked out of the hall with a ‘see-you-again’ air.
If only, if only I didn’t have a
conscience.
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