STARMOTE

I was in the 5th grade, writing an exam. Serious business. Pencils sharpened. Brain working at about 40% capacity.

My classmate Akshaya was sitting next to me. At some point I realized she was copying my answers. Now, what a mature and morally evolved child would do is simply cover the paper.

What I did instead was… strategy.

I started writing wrong answers on purpose. Let her copy them. Then, when she wasn’t looking, I erased them and wrote the correct answers. I remember feeling incredibly proud of myself. Like I had just executed some kind of academic espionage operation.

I went home and narrated the entire story to my mom. Joyfully. Expecting admiration. Possibly even snacks.

Instead, she gave me a tight slap.

Then she looked at me with that very specific disappointed-parent look and said something I still remember clearly:

“You killed someone’s trust. If you knew she was copying, you could have simply closed your paper. What you did was far more sinister.”

At the time I was mostly processing the slap. But the sentence stayed.

Apparently “being clever” and “being right” are not always the same thing.

The second incident came from my father.

One day while returning from a meeting, he stopped at a small roadside shop for lunch. There he saw a mentally unstable man wandering nearby. My father bought him food and gave it to him.

The man sat down and started eating. Laughing. Smiling. Just very happy to have a meal.

And then someone else at the shop got angry.

He started shouting at the shop owner for allowing the man to sit there “like everyone else.” And in that anger, he even beat the poor man.

My father later called me and told me this story. He sounded disturbed and asked me something that didn’t really have an answer.

“Why are people like this?”

Then he said something simple.

“If you see someone like him, treat him without prejudice.”

Looking back, those two moments taught me two very different things.

My mother taught me about trust.

My father taught me about compassion.

And somewhere between those two lessons is probably the closest thing I have to a moral compass.

Still working on it, though.