Honest Diplomacy

“Honest Is the Best Policy” seems to be a saying that has remained as words with no action to it. Have you ever noticed the trend lately that when you are honest you’re rewarded with some punishment rather than an appreciation for the honesty shown. Take any instance in your life, when in school and we committed a mistake we were rewarded with either kneeling in front of the class, a beating or to the extremes of suspension. When we are honest about our feelings with our boy/girl friend, who we were intimate with it, we were rewarded with anger or rejection. When we are honest with our jobs and voice our honest opinions against the wrongs of the senior or colleague, we are rewarded with demotion or treated as an outcast or worse termination. When we try to be honest with our spouse, it is rewarded with fights and worse a divorce, which has actually become a flavor of the day.

It is so ironic that throughout our childhood we are always taught to be honest and true to our feelings and actions. This is as long as we are in the care of our parents and school’s comfort but as we enter into the senior stages of our lives and close in to the threshold of a career it seems that honesty is the worst policy and with every honest word uttered there is a sense of agitation against you. The world starts to treat you as a handicap and fails to understand the importance of your words and your action of being honest.

There was nothing to worry for all the honest people, because after the sunset comes the sunrise and we were introduced to a new fundamental of life, “Diplomacy”. This is the new strategy that we would need to use to grow to the success; defined by our parents and society in general. Diplomacy is the way of life, smile at the wrong and walk past the fallen. In the lingo of the corporate world, SYA(Save Your Arse). It clearly means, steer away from those who are trying to be honest in this cruel world, turn a blind eye to the righteous and welcome the wrongs and dishonesty into the place of work or life by itself. If we stop and take a look around us we will be surprised that we are engulfed by this sin and yet we are reluctant to change it.

Let us take a famous example. Andre Agassi, is a well known tennis player having won many Tennis grand slams in his prime. In his recent book, he mentioned that he was addicted to pleasure drugs during his prime as he was in a bout of depression and had to cope with it. In no way, were the drugs enhancing his playing skills; it was his personal abilities that enabled him to win. However, on his honest revelation in his book he was taunted, put down and said it’s a shame that he had taken the drugs, as it was a violation of the code of conduct for the sports fraternity. I am not glorifying the wrong here or saying that what he did was right. I am stressing on the point that had he not written about it in his book none of us would have know about it and none of us would have had a second opinion about him. Not even the sports bodies that are suddenly making a hue and cry about the whole issue. They never detected it when he was taking it, let alone now. They cannot even prove that he did take the drugs and that it was not a simple publicity stunt by the sportsman to sell his book.

“It’s not about what you say but what is perceived by the other person.” This is what a friend of mine had shared with me in the early days of my college as I was among those honest lot of people who were mostly shunned away for their straightforward and honest opinion. Today I am the diplomatic and calm person who had been battered with society’s irony of honesty and am a good diplomat. Thanks to the change in me I suddenly have more friends and more acquaintances who are becoming friends. Hence, I say to all those who are entering into the threshold of their careers and to those who are straightforward in their approach. In the 21st century, honesty is taking a break and it’s DIPLOMACY that has become the best policy for all.