by Ashok Kumar Gulla

Created on: August 28, 2010

Whether honesty is a best policy or not depends on what we perceive to achieve in life. People who lose real purpose of life and get swayed with momentarily pleasures do tend to resort to manipulative practices and dishonest means. They may gain in short term comforts but likely to lose long term peace and happiness. However, when higher purpose of life predominates our thinking, honesty is the preferred policy despite some discomforts in adhering to it. Honesty has a great intangible value as it creates a feeling of inter-connectedness with others which is difficult to conceive.

Honesty is the need of our soul. It helps a person to grow spiritually by shedding various negative attributes coming out of dishonesty. An honest person will thus be full of good feelings for others; whether he tells truth in the literally sense or not; but he will be thinking about good of others and will not favor wrong doing. He feels interconnectedness with others and does not wish to harm others. An honest person generally is a law abiding citizen.

It has become common to talk about honesty; however, very few people know the real essence of honesty. Honesty goes beyond truthfulness; it encompasses broader dimensions of our life and touches the basic edifice and values that we like to prophase and nurture in life. It advocates doing all the activities based on fair dealing without cheating anyone. So, basically, honesty means giving a value to truth. If one acknowledges his mistakes, if one never tells a lie, if one is true to someone, the person can be called 'an honest person'. Honesty means simply stating facts and views as best one believes them to be. It includes honesty to others, and to oneself.

People may be truthful in the day to day life situations; however, when telling truth is detrimental to your own self-interest; it needs greater inner courage to be truthful by sacrificing your self- interest. Hence, honesty as a foundation of your values in life demands to remain truthful not only in the ordinary sense, but to give it precedence to other benefits in life.

A person will be honest if he thinks about well being of others as important as his own. He prefers not to gain in importance and stature, both professionally and materially by avoiding taking undue advantages and harming the interest of others. Hence, such a person will like that other person also to get similar opportunity to grow in his career and profession. He is interested in a level playing field. Honesty

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>