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07:32 PM
Bikram Vohra
JournalismPakistan.com
June 12, 2013
Integrity is what you do when no one is looking. Yet, all of us know people who don’t have it. Integrity, that is. But we still mix with them, break bread, give them time, even befriend them even though we know if they are kneeling at our feet they are going to pull the plug. What is it about us, as a race that we fall so easily into the trap?
It has been said that the sports field is one place where true character of a person comes to the fore. Like that awful feeling creeping over us that so and so cheats. We don’t want to believe it, we pretend it is an aberration but the aberrations jells into a habit and yet we don’t let them leak out of our lives.
We continue to play golf, meet them on the tennis court, across the bridge table, over a round of rummy, in the squash court, while that suspicion gnaws at us.
That’s all it does. Gnaws. We never take them up on it. We never say, hello, you are a cheat, that shot was IN.
Fine, we don’t want to make a scene, I’ll buy that. No one does. But what weakness lies in us that we do not drop them. Because by not doing so we are only encouraging bad behavior.
They are not just sore losers, which you can live with. Such people turn nasty when they are losing, they become crafty and mean and rude and lose all their graces and you can see it in their body language and the way they Hyde into Jekyll and then, what do we do, we invite them for dinner again.
Don’t walk away. You know someone like that. The one who calls ‘out’ even before the ball has dropped. The one who has to win at all costs, even if it means sucker punching you. And I bet even as you read this you are conjuring up instances where you got taken.
Drop them, really.
(The writer is a Senior Editorial Advisor of Khaleej Times and the paper’s former Editor. He has also been the Editor of Gulf News, Gulf Today, Emirates Today and Bahrain Tribune)
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