“WHAT would you like to be - a good girl or a bad girl?” a mother asked her two-yearold. Pat came the reply, ‘Bad girl.’ Even as the mother laughed, the girl beamed with the clarity of a two-year-old. It’s hard to sell ‘good’ these days...even to a two-year-old! “Beagood girl,” was once upon a time,acommand understood, obeyed (...to some degrees) and rewarded (if only with a word of appreciation and smile). Now, even showers of appreciation fail to cajole little ladies into entering that age-old sect of ‘good-ism.’ There is something verynot-so-good about the 'good' these days. “Bad may be fun for a while, but good gets the ultimate reward.” This once-preached wisdom seems to have lived its days. Understanding the human tendencies well, wellknown humourist MarkTwain had famously said that one should ‘go to heaven from climate, hell for company’.

 

 

We,theoffspringsofthehumanracehardlycare for the climate (as it gets very evident from each passing day). Company, though, is of utmost importance and so we - making an extremely conscious choice - choose to gotohell,quiteliterally.Andsince heavenandclimateboth,despite centuries of work, have miserably failed to sway us the other way, hell in the company of baddies is something we cherish. You may ask me to stop my rant and define ‘good’ and ‘bad’ for clearer understanding. For, ‘Good’ of the yore may not be ‘good’ anymore, whereas the ‘bad’ of the olden times, may be sans any crimes!Understood. Agreed. But I haveahuge problem with definitions. They are expected to be so structured.

 

They try to fit the fluidity of human emotions, attributes and character in a tight box! Since good and bad - being only degrees of comparison based on human judgement (which often finds itself at great hardship being just) - havealong history of being suffocated within structures. Look now, it seems the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ both have escaped the grasp of definition. But, for comfort’s sake, let’s say good is a behaviour generally agreed upon and bad is a behaviour generallydisagreedupon.Inconclusion,goodpeoplebehave in the generally agreed upon ways and bad people behave in a way generally disagreed upon. Good and bad have moral implications, too, in the sense ofright and wrong but since society itself has never been consistent on that, definitions have been varying from person to person, place to place, situation to situation. For example, speaking the truth is the most honourable, most good thing to do until you speak it on someone’s face. Honesty may have been designated as the best policy but experiences of people tell a different story.Humility,amarker of goodness, can often be a guile for survival. So, when the tenets of ‘goodism’ sound more like blind faith, how can this poor sect find followers? Followers–ifyouanalysethetrajectoryofthatword, youwouldseewhygoodisn’tgoodanymore.Followers were a section of people who, in absolute good faith, followed wisdom.

 

So, there were followers ofBhagwan Mahaveer,BhagwanBuddha,LordJesusChrist,Prophet Mohammad, Adi Shankaracharya, Guru Nanak Devji. These followers tried to follow the wisdom of these great men not just in words, but in spirit with utmost goodness, sincerity and commitment, to raise themselvesfromtheordinary-nessoflife.Today,lookwhere the word has nosedived. Anybody who thinks he is somebody can get followers. These followers follow and unfollow with an equal amount of peripheral zeal! This is how hollow, follow has become! One meaning of the word ‘good’ is also about quality,acertain standard.

 

So, with the good there is a certain amount of raising the bar. It speaks of good’s potential to be better and the best.If only we had kept the bar of goodness rising just like we have kept the bar of our convenience going higher and higher. There may be many reasons for ‘good’ falling on such bad days. But what seems like the most fatal flaw of good is that it is least lucrative. While good needs rewarding, bad is a reward unto itself. I remember duringmyschooldaysthebrighteststudentwasmade the monitor. But monitoring a class of baddies was too much of an uphill task for the good student, so teachers came up with a solution to the problem.

 

The ‘baddest’was giventhe toppositionofbeing themonitor. He monitored and how! Problem solved. But the undecided few like us who were not sure whether to remain in the confines of good or get pulled by the lure of bad, saw bad being rewarded.This is how some ofthenaughtiestkidsthinktheycanwinaNobelPeace Prize for bullying others into stopping confrontation and telling the world that they are ‘so good’ because they themselves are not going into war. AcharyaChanakya’sstrategicprinciple–keepfriends close, enemies closer may have helped people strategically but the larger society seems to have forgotten the difference between a friend and a foe. In the world where Jesus is crucified and Gandhi shot dead, ‘good’ does not come across as a good alternative.

 

Oh Goodness me! Do I sound very pessimistic? No, I have great faith in the greatness of the good. For,that little element of choice between good and bad has always decided our fate, whether we make our world heaven or hell. So let us, through our thoughts, words and action, build a case for good. Let our applause for good not be silent. Let us not allow bad to go unchallenged. Let us, as a society, learn to not be even but just. Let us never take the easy route of making the naughtiest guy the class monitor.