Character Certificate

When I left school many set years ago (1962), the Headmasters hanged over to us a document. The last line of that Performa character certificate haunts me these days: “to the best of my knowledge, Mr. XYZ bears a good moral character”.  I do not know if such certificates are still handed out by Headmasters/Principals of school, but for me this line has a significance that its innocuous simplicity does not betray.

“To the best of my knowledge” is an admission of doubt. It is an acknowledgement of the limits not only of our knowledge, but of our limitations as moral and ethical creature. Certitude is the human aspiration to be God; this line warns us against the perils of the entertaining high levels of certainty, which, In turn, breeds the illusion if permanence. Knowledge, power, wealth, wisdom love and hatred: all these have the potential generate the virus of absolute certainty. The password to overcoming this is to doubt the absolute claims of the source of that certainty, be it technology, the balance sheet, a university gold medal, published tomes or even the Bhagavad Gita. The Mahabharata counsels us to leave dharma and adharma, leave truth and untruth, and then leave all those things that enabled us to leave them. The first step towards such lofty detachment is to doubt the absolute and truth.

“Bears a good moral character” is the second element. The operative term here is not ‘moral’ but ‘character ‘. Human formations often neglect this all-important aspect of human existence. The aim of a school becomes achieving 100 per cent results, the end of a state is often subordinated to achieving glory in war, profit becomes the ultimate goal of an oragnisation, and, finally, individuals abdicate the concern for character in favour of wealth, virtue, libido or salvation.

Character or charitra is, however, hard to define. It is certainly not reducible to a set of moral and ethical codes alone. The most tentative way to define it is to conduct, or rectitude. This is to concern oneself with two very important aspects of human life: the means-ends question and the concern for the ‘other’.

The question of means creates moral dilemmas, throws up paradoxes and builds a creative tension in our lives. To be able to become a fine football player, one has to be out there in the field and practice and train regularly. Goodness and right conduct too require a regular, ongoing effort; character is the cumulative outcome of a constant preoccupation with goodness.

All organizations today concern themselves with efficiency, productivity, professionalism and growth - admirable ends in them. Very few, however, are concerned with character. Like all things that involve the ideas of freedom, Playfulness, Individuality, and democracy. The idea of character is at once liberating and disruptive.

I look out of my office window and see pyres burning in the cremation ground next door. I am reminded of the prayer of the dying man from isavasya Upanishad (verse 17). The constant refrain that permeates this verse is

“krato smarakritam samara krito smarakritam samara”-

O mind! Remember my deeds. The constant repetition of this also shows an anxiety, uneasiness, and a sense of uncertainty.

May be it is too late then to begin to ask the question of character. Perhaps this should have been done much earlier. One can only offer a prayer to the fire that will end all that is there. And be attitude by a good path (question of means). Remove all that is crooked and degrading in us.” Laterally, this is the dying man’s prayer. Imaginatively, it ought to be the prayer for the newborn.