Mitali Saran: The golden compass

It's become awfully uncool to talk about morality - people tend to sneer at it. It's positively de rigueur to talk about money: who's making it, how much, how, how more of it can be made, and whether and how the discussants can get in on the pie. Start a conversation about compassion, respect and integrity, however, and people will not even bother letting their eyes glaze over; they'll just walk away.

Law is still cool, since interpreting law is a value-neutral exercise. Find the tax loophole, get off on a technicality, plead insanity - any means of furthering the life and liberty of an individual is valid legal ammunition towards getting a fair hearing. You either follow legal guidelines, or risk performing legally prescribed acts of penitence. There isn't much soul-searching involved.

Value-charged territory is boggier and smellier. It requires introspective effort, nobody is demanding it of us, and therefore we'd rather not go there.

But not going there, not engaging with something in a collective conversation, means that we agree to leave it to the vocal fringes and to the path of least resistance. Neither the fundamentalist left nor the fundamentalist right represents what I think of as a reasonable moral compass; but the real issue is that nothing in what we see or hear around us encourages us to sweat that stuff anyway. It's simply not relevant.

Our compass cleaves to gold, not iron. We appear to have agreed, as a society, that our true north is profit. If you can show someone how either word or deed will profit him or her personally, you automatically solve any moral ambiguity there might have been in either word or deed. Bingo! It's just as good as the law as far as value-neutral goes, and so much more motivating.

There's nothing wrong with profit. It's wonderful. But, as you might say of power, absolute profit corrupts absolutely. The trouble is that when you're cranking out humans at the rate of over 25 million a year, and very few of them are learning to think about and value anything other than personal profit, you are creating a nation largely free of the burden of ethical decision-making. Someday that has to come back and bite you in the butt. That day is, arguably, today.

Political life has long been leached of any kind of moral orientation, but morality - thinking about it critically, trying to live by some version of it - is becoming more or less irrelevant to the rest of India too, and that's much more dangerous. Corruption, often perfectly "rational" by the lights of the golden compass, has become so normalised, so standard, that we don't even notice it. When you live next to a sewer, your children are likely to grow up assuming that that's how air is supposed to smell.

We do have a blinding abundance of two largely uncritical versions of morality. One is religion, which prescribes codes of ethics that by definition go unquestioned, and which ritually safeguards spiritual health without any great effort of the spirit. The other is sexual morality - great whacking truckloads of that - which is increasingly the default context in which the word "morality" is used. Sexual morality, the way India commonly interprets it, is about the aggressive social enforcement of status quo power structures, not about agonising about such delicate pickles as whether or not to tell your lover that you have herpes/a spouse. Both sexual morality and religious codes are applied with a sledgehammer, in a way designed to discourage dissent.

But we are not, as a nation, being encouraged to aspire to anything finer in ourselves. On the contrary, if your compass doesn't tune out everything but profit, you're dismissed as a fool. If you're not using your friends and family, you're an idiot. If you're focusing on excellence even though you could get by with pretty good, you're wasting your time. Forget learning to drive, just buy the licence. Never mind whether you actually understand a skill, just wangle the certification.

Morality may have fallen out of fashion (people who think of themselves as "rational" certainly love to hate it) but ignoring it comes with a nasty price tag. We are increasingly prone to avoidable violence, gender oppression, caste atrocities, rioting, scams large and small, and trust deficits. Seeing morality as somehow goofy or holier-than-thou or irrelevant - and as something imposed rather than self-generated - translates into creating the kind of stunted place India is becoming.

Indian kids need to be taught to think critically, and encouraged to aspire to be rich human beings, not just people with lots of money. Fashions tend to experience cycles. This is a good time to bring morality back into the discourse.