Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “Don’t take away lies from humans; they can’t live without it”. Had he been alive now, Nietzsche would not have said so, for he would have realized the futility of such an advice. It would have sounded superficial in today’s world, where lives and lies have become inseparable. Why are we scared of truth? Do we think that truth would hurt us? Is that why we are forcing ourselves to be pretentious? Philosophers suggest that, it is only human beings who crave to become someone else other than their own self. Even animals do not try to be different from their normal self. But we human beings want to be different in every possible dimension. Self-help books on ‘holistic pretensions’ available in abundance in the market, teach us how to behave in a particular way to achieve a particular result. We are led to a dream-world where everything looks easy.

At the drop of a hat, we can influence people, win friendship, achieve success in life, and so on! If we have the ability to analyse the message and methods outlined in such bestsellers, we would realise that acting is what is required more than anything else. Judging people by their behaviour is an age-old method, supported by scientific studies and experiments. Accordingly, behavioural analysis has become a part of management studies. Behavioural training for interview is big business now. Many follow their advices and turn pretenders before the interviewer. Good actors get away, but get caught later, whereas the bad ones fail to impress. We forget that the theory of behavioural training applies only to natural behaviour and not acting. As the word suggests, pretension adds tension. It makes one confused, and in certain cases even causes split personality.

Each human is unique, and it is impossible to clone his behaviour. Such training corrupts natural instincts, and gives birth to fake humans. Promoting pretensions becomes the rule rather than the exception, forcing people to be pretenders throughout their life. It leads to personality crisis. Eastern philosophers used to define personality as what others see in a person. But we dance to the tunes of the society pretending to be somebody other than what we really are. Personality itself is something which is not real, and we are being taught and trained to chase the unreal. It would be fun to go in reverse gear and analyze. We would then be surprised to note that personality is just a behavioural pattern at a particular time in a given circumstance. Decorative deceptions are the recognized forms of such pretensions. Nobody questions such deceptions. On the contrary, the most decorative presentations are well appreciated despite the fact that they are the biggest deceptions. The world of advertising, for instance is a good illustration of the business of deception.

Creating awareness of a product is the purpose behind K K Premlal View Point Honestly Dishonest Whiteline Journal April 2009 39 an advertisement, but in reality it attempts to deceive the audience, creating a ‘feeling of want’ for the product. 100 hours of Coaching Non conventional Approach Convenient Timings Experienced Trainers Conversational Classes in English, Marathi & Malayalam Sar Charitable Trust Contact: (0251) 2438112 Don’t be at a Loss of Words! Communicate Freely, Fluently & Confidently. Deception has penetrated to such levels that today you come across professional resume writers. Once it was the prerogative of the rich to hire professional writers to pen stories and autobiographies in their names. Ghost writing as it is known, is prevalent throughout the film industry, where most of the stories and screen plays are in fact not written by those whose names appear on the screen. The actual writers sell their creations for money. A resume is expected to present the true nature of a candidate so that the interviewer is in a position to assess the candidate’s merits and demerits. With a ‘ghostwritten’ resume, that opportunity is totally lost. The emphasis is on decoration. At the same time, it also changes its avatars to suit the industry and environment where it is forwarded. Of late even honesty has begun to assume a different meaning. Without thinking, we refer to people who take commissions and deliver the agreed work as honest agents or brokers. For politicians, honesty is generally a non existent virtue. As the days go by, even the honest ones have begun to suspect - Is honesty real or fake?