The Culture of Five Positives

The United Nations, World Bank, and the global coalition against corruption, Transparency International, define corruption as 'use of public office for private gain'. Fully agreeing with this definition, I have tried to look for the cause of corruption and reached the conclusion that WHEN GREED MEETS OPPORTUNITY , CORRUPTION TAKES PLACE. This can be reduced to a neat mathematical equation C = G X O, or C is G times O, where C is corruption, G greed, and O opportunity. Following from this is the painful truth that so long as a greedy person will have opportunity, corruption will be a fact of life. Even if corruption is quite ubiquitous, organisations, big and small, must find ways to overcome it, if they have to last long and truly serve the society. In the following, it will be seen how this could be done. By the very nature of their responsibilities, the few persons at the top of any organisation, profit or non-profit, have immense opportunity. So, even if they have...

To be able to answer a student's query "What's there for me in the culture of Four Positives, how do I benefit by following it?", I have to go back in time to my own student days and then examine the relevance of these four positive values, Honesty, Excellence, Law-abidingness, and Responsibility, to me as a student. Honesty: Total honesty with myself would prompt me to admit if I have difficulty in mastering a particular concept or topic of study, and then seek help form my teachers, and classmates. Like that, my study would have solid foundations, rather it being just a pursuit of good marks. Excellence: Even if I improve 1% per week, in 70 weeks, I would be twice as good as now. This is the power of continuous improvement, or kaizen as our Japanese friends would say. I will also hugely gain, in terms of time and energy saved, by DRIFT or doing it right the first time, even if I am able to do it half the time. I am also attracted by doing every thin...

There are so many reasons for India continuing even today to make the ranks of a developing country but one of the most important ones could be the acceptance, and sometimes even celebration, of mediocrity in nearly all spheres of our society. Striving for excellence is taking the hard call, so, make do with the ordinary, the mediocre or worse, even Jugaad (Hindi term for ‘make-do somehow’). A natural corollary to this mental make-up is the ‘chalata hai’ (Hindi for “anything goes”) attitude. That attitude will do if the presently low standard of development is to be maintained but not for making a quantum improvement in any field.

Asked recently what was the reason  India  was still a developing country more than seven decades after  independence and obvious progress in some fields, an elderly gentleman, who had been a member of an all-India service for all but the first two of the Indian republic's first forty years, replied that our DNA was defective. Well, the fault does not lie in our DNA but in the culture we have developed and have adopted over the last couple of centuries. Barring for some honourable exceptions, it is a culture of dishonesty, self-delusion, indiscipline, irresponsibility, and under-performance. If  India  is to really do justice to the talent of a billion plus Indians and the opportunities they are having, the present negative culture will have to be replaced by the culture of four positives - Honesty, Excellence, Law-abidingness, and Responsibility. What follows is an explanation, in some detail, of each of these four positives. #1  Honesty Honesty ...