LESSON FIVE

Lies Are Clutter

Bapuji had high blood pressure and believed in only natural cures. While I was staying with him, he left to spend some time at a nature cure clinic run by a doctor in the town of Poona, which had pure air and a mild climate. I was thrilled that he took me with him. Even though he was there for his health, important people continued to come by to consult with him.

One morning after prayers and yoga, I sat on the steps of the clinic, enjoying the cool morning breeze and the fresh smell of flowers. I was lost in thought when someone came up behind me and put his arms around my shoulders. I spun around and was stunned to see Jawaharlal Nehru, who would soon become the first prime minster of an independent India. He was already very famous around the world and regarded as second only to my grandfather in importance in that country. It was the first time I saw him in person, and I was starstruck. I had gotten used to hanging out with Bapuji, but now to meet Nehru!

“Good morning. Would you like to join me for breakfast?” Nehru asked.

“Yes, of course,” I said. I stood up, trying to stay calm, and as we walked to the dining room, he kept his arm around me.

When we settled at our table, he scanned the short menu and asked me what I wanted to eat.

“Whatever you’re having,” I blurted out.

“No, I’m having an omelet, and I don’t think your grandfather would like you to eat that,” he said. He knew Bapuji was a strict vegetarian and didn’t eat eggs or fish, and he assumed that I had been raised as a vegetarian. As it happens, he was right. But I wanted to impress him, and it suddenly seemed very important that I eat the same meal he did.

“He won’t mind,” I said confidently.

Nehru had too much respect for my grandfather to risk offending him, so he told me that I would need to get permission from Bapuji before I ordered.

I jumped up and ran to my grandfather’s room. He was in a serious discussion with Sardar Patel, who became the deputy prime minister of independent India under Prime Minister Nehru. But at that moment breakfast seemed much more important to me than the fate of India.

“Bapuji, can I eat an omelet?” I asked excitedly.

He looked up at me with surprise: “Have you ever had eggs?” he asked.

“Yes, I ate them in South Africa,” I answered. This was a blatant lie, but it tripped easily off my tongue.

“All right, then, go ahead,” he said.

Lying was so easy! I ran back to Nehru and announced that grandfather didn’t mind at all my having an omelet.

“I’m surprised,” he said, but he ordered the omelet for me. I felt the breakfast was a great triumph. I can’t say that I particularly liked the eggs, but one little lie and I was able to have what seemed to me a sophisticated breakfast with Nehru.

Some weeks later Bapuji and I were in Mumbai, and members of the Birla family, who were very wealthy Indian industrialists, invited us to stay at their opulent mansion. It was so lavish and different from the ashram that I could hardly believe we were there. I spent one afternoon exploring the gardens, which looked out on the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean. I didn’t realize my parents had arrived and had gone up to the first floor to visit with Bapuji. I later learned that the first question Bapuji asked them was whether I ate eggs at home, to which they had answered, “Of course not!”

I was daydreaming in the garden when my relative Abha, who also traveled with Bapuji, tracked me down. “Bapuji wants to see you in his room. You better go right away because you’re in big trouble,” she said.

“What have I done?” I asked incredulously. I had been trying so hard to practice model behavior.

“Don’t ask me,” she said with a shrug.

I went into the mansion and was surprised to see my parents there, kneeling with their heads bowed. They didn’t look up as I walked in. Everyone seemed very serious. I thought briefly how small Bapuji looked in the enormous gilded room. But his strength didn’t come from his size.

My grandfather beckoned silently for me to come and sit next to him. He put his arm around my shoulders. “You remember that day in Poona when you asked me if you could eat an omelet?” he asked. “You told me you had eaten eggs before, and so I allowed it. I just asked your parents and they say they have never given you eggs to eat. So now please explain who I am to believe.”

I felt my heart beating very hard. I didn’t want Bapuji to lose faith in me, so I thought fast. “Bapuji, we did eat cakes and pastries at home, and I think they are made with eggs,” I said earnestly.

My grandfather looked at me for a moment, taking in my point, then burst into loud laughter. “You will be a good lawyer, my son. I will accept that. Now run along and play,” he said, patting me on the back.

I left the room quickly, avoiding everybody’s eyes. I had been cleared, but the agony of the encounter stayed with me. All these years later I still think about it. Lying often seems like the easiest course at the moment, but when we lie to others, we are also lying to ourselves. We could gain so much more by facing the truth from the beginning. That day in Poona I pretended to Bapuji that eating an omelet was no big deal, and so I told myself that too. Rarely do we casually think, “I choose to be a terrible person today and lie.” Instead we convince ourselves that what we’re doing is—somehow!—okay. We hide the truth from ourselves as much as from others.

Avoiding lies is difficult because it requires recognizing our desires and then admitting them. How much better it would have been for both Bapuji and me if, rushing over to him that morning in Poona, I had admitted I’d never eaten eggs but that I thought it was time I did. I could have explained that I thought I was old enough to make the decision for myself whether or not to be a strict vegetarian. I might have confessed my infatuation with Nehru and discussed that too with Bapuji.

Many of us lie when we feel frustrated that we’re not in control of our lives. That’s a common condition among children and teenagers, who are expected to follow the rules adults set. I recently heard a very smart ten-year-old negotiating with his parents about how much longer he could stay on his computer. He had just learned coding and was excited to finish a project, but his parents insisted it was time for bed. As he ran out of real arguments (“I’m right in the middle of this!”), I could hear him veering toward some half-truths (“My teacher wants me to do this all night!”). Parents can help children avoid lies by treating their desires with honesty and respect.

It’s also important that parents themselves don’t slip into lying just because it’s easier than telling the truth. When parents set an example of lying about little things (“The shot won’t hurt”), their children learn that it’s an acceptable technique.

A lot of people—children and adults—resort to lies when they feel powerless, thinking lying will make them stronger. Usually, though, lying makes you weaker. You typically get tripped up by a lie, as I did with the omelet. But even if nobody picks up on the twisted facts, your victory is only short term. By lying, you undermine your sense of self and erode the very power you were trying to achieve. You may begin to believe that you can be successful only by presenting a false face to the world.

Many people dabble in lying at some point, but hopefully they outgrow it and gain enough faith in themselves to say the truth of what they really believe. I can understand the impetus that makes children lie, but it’s sad when politicians fall into the same web and offer lie after lie. Their own vanity becomes much more important than the integrity of the position they want to attain. They are trying to get elected, but they can never lead, because they are weak and insecure at the core.

Knowing the incredible person he became, it’s easy to think of my grandfather as a perfect human being who resisted all temptations and never veered from absolute honesty. But none of us is perfect. Bapuji knew that lies are a very human foible. He had his own experiences being deceptive when he was young; that’s probably why he let me off so easily with the egg story.

When he was about twelve years old, Bapuji fell into a trap many children find irresistible: being attracted to the forbidden. For him, that included meat and cigarettes. He watched people smoking cigarettes and thought emitting puffs of smoke from your mouth looked alluring. At first he tried to puff on the discarded stubs he found. Then he wanted to get real Indian cigarettes, and he started pilfering coins from around the house to buy them. The appeal of cigarettes soon disappeared, however. Long before anyone knew just how bad smoking is for your health, he declared it “barbarous, dirty, and harmful.” He didn’t like traveling in trains where people smoked; he said it made him choke.

His meat eating also involved subterfuge, but it had a slightly more noble cause. As a scrawny kid obsessed with India’s freedom, Bapuji wondered how he could ever stand up to the British, who individually seemed so much bigger and braver than he was. A taunting nursery rhyme from those days claimed that the British were strong because they ate meat, and the vegetarian Hindus could never compete with them. Bapuji’s closest friend was a Muslim who shared that view. “If you want to be big and strong like the British and be able to push them out of India, you need to eat meat,” the boy told my grandfather.

So Bapuji decided to go on a secret diet of meat eating to bulk up. Deceiving his parents required some complicated machinations. He and his friend snuck off to a quiet spot by the river for Bapuji to try meat for the first time. He didn’t like it and even had terrible nightmares afterward. But he decided to stick with it. For almost a year his Muslim friend cooked up goat and other meats for him, and Bapuji devoured his dinners on the sly. Lies led to more lies. When he came home from one of his clandestine meals and wasn’t hungry for whatever his mom had made, he claimed that he had a stomachache. He even stole a piece of gold from his brother to pay for more meat.

All the sneaking around made Bapuji feel bad. And despite all the meat he ate, he wasn’t growing the way he’d hoped. It turns out eating meat doesn’t make you any stronger than eating a balanced vegetarian diet! So he decided to give up meat and stop lying to his parents.

Confessing to an ongoing lie is hard, and Bapuji struggled with his conscience for a while. He couldn’t bring himself to tell his parents face-to-face, so he decided to write them a letter, admitting his deception and asking forgiveness. But then he struggled with actually giving them the letter. His father was quite ill by then, and Bapuji was helping take care of him at home. One evening when the two of them were alone, he found the courage to give him the letter. His father read and reread the words, and soon both of them had tears streaming down their faces. His father finally pulled Bapuji to his chest and whispered, “I forgive you, son.”

Bapuji looked back on that time with sadness. When he told me this story, he explained that a clean confession combined with a promise not to repeat the mistake can help others trust you again. But he also wanted me to know that lying and the avoidance of truth are behaviors we all struggle with. Lies are like sand; they cannot create a solid foundation. Whatever you build on top of them is shaky and insecure. If you keep piling them up, your sandcastle of lies will eventually topple.

Bapuji found out firsthand that it’s better to deal with the repercussions of truth than the regret of lies. It would be nice if you could learn that lesson once and have it stick with you for life. But even Bapuji had to learn it over and over again. He lied about the cigarettes, about eating meat, and about stealing—until finally, after his confession to his father, he decided that he would never lie again. That was when he eventually wrote that Truth has “an indescribable luster, a million times more intense than that of the sun.”

Bapuji made an interesting connection between lying and the complicated concept of ahimsa. One of the cardinal virtues in Hinduism and Buddhism and other religions, ahimsa holds that we should never do anything to hurt each other or ourselves. It’s easy to understand how that was the basis for Bapuji’s nonviolence movement, but it has a much deeper meaning that includes other kinds of harm we do. Bapuji believed that controlling our instincts to lie and deceive was a lot harder than giving up physical fighting.

Like Bapuji, I needed a couple of rounds of lying before I came out firmly on the side of telling the truth in all situations. But that is where I have ended up and will remain. When I hear how facts are distorted during political debates, I’m amazed to realize that some people would have you think truth is just whatever they want it to be. Science doesn’t have all the answers, but we have to rely on the best facts we have in the search for an absolute truth. If you claim that global warming isn’t real, that immigrants cause crime, or that discrimination doesn’t exist, you are purposely ignoring facts and letting emotional lies win the day. Perhaps you have personal reasons to oppose immigration or support discrimination, but be honest with yourself about what those are. Don’t build a future for yourself or your government on that deceptive foundation of sand. Bapuji said that his dedication to the Truth is what drew him into politics. That would be a great model for others to follow!

One man I know jokes that he gave up lying because he wasn’t smart enough to remember all the stories he told and what he said to whom. He didn’t want to keep cluttering up his life with lies. Whatever your reason, sticking to the truth ends up being a lot more powerful than pretending to be something you’re not.

Americans praise people who are “authentic,” who take on a cause or a position they truly believe in. I often think about my grandfather in his simple shawl and sandals, getting millions of people to follow him. How did he do it? I think people were drawn by the truth in his heart and the authenticity of his passion.

People speak in awe about the Salt March he led in 1930 as a nonviolent protest against British rule. Salt was a staple in the Indian diet, but locals were prohibited from collecting or selling their own salt and had to buy it from the British. A heavy tax was put on top of it too. My grandfather decided to make abolishing the salt tax a key part of his next nonviolent campaign. He had long believed that he could negotiate with the British and encourage them to be more just, so he sent a heartfelt letter to the viceroy, describing the problems and injustices he wanted corrected. The viceroy sent back a four-line reply saying only that Gandhi shouldn’t break the law.

“On bended knee, I asked for bread and I received stone instead,” Bapuji told his followers.

He announced then his plan to march some 240 miles to the Arabian Sea. Once there he would defy the law and collect salt from the water’s edge. Just about everyone at the ashram where he was then living wanted to join him, but he picked only a few dozen to follow him. The youngest person on the march was sixteen; my grandfather, at sixty-one, was the oldest. The morning they set out, everyone at the ashram was up before dawn to see them off. A crowd of thousands from nearby towns also gathered, and reporters came from all over Europe, America, and India.

Every day of the march, my grandfather stopped in local towns along the way and explained his plan—and more and more people joined.

“This is a struggle of not one man, but millions of us,” he said at one village, where some thirty thousand people had gathered to listen and pledge their support.

By the time Bapuji arrived at the sea a month later, tens of thousands were walking with him. My grandfather then famously stepped onto the beach, reached down, and took a lump of natural salt from the mud.

“With this salt, I am shaking the foundations of the empire!” he declared.

He had defied the British. Without violence or anger, he had shown that subjugating people is wrong. His friend Mahadev Desai, who was at his side, later reported that when they saw Bapuji on the beach, others in the crowd also gathered salt in their hands, laughing and singing and praying. The whole of India seemed to respond. The British soon stepped in and arrested my grandfather and some sixty thousand others. But the message had been sent, and millions more continued the civil disobedience. All along the coast, Indian nationalists gathered in huge crowds to make salt. There was not enough room in the jails for all of them.

My grandfather was not a fiery orator, and he didn’t have an army or organized political party behind him. But he drew the support of tens of thousands of marchers and millions more supporters who sensed that he would speak only the deepest truths to them. He was motivated by honesty and deep belief. That is very hard to resist.

Deciding to forgo lies and follow the truth can change your life—and maybe your country.