Mullah & Diwali

Mullah Nasruddin found a gold ring lying on the road. He picked it up and put it on. It was perfect. He liked it and wanted to keep it. He furtively looked around to see if anyone had noticed him picking it up. Fortunately, no one had.

But there was a hurdle.  Someone had lost that ring. According to the laws of the land, if you picked up something like that, you should go to the market square and loudly shout three times that you found it. If no one came forward to claim it, you would be the new owner. 

Nasruddin didn’t want to break the law, but he desperately wanted to keep the ring. He was also pretty sure that if he declared his discovery in public, someone would claim the gold ring’s ownership.

His fertile mind worked hard on this problem and came out with a brilliant solution. He went to the market square well past midnight and shouted three times, “I found this gold ring on market street.” 

By the time people sleeping at shopfronts at the square woke up hearing his shouts, the job was done. But they rushed to him and asked him what he had said. He told them, “The law requires me to shout three times that I’ve found something; but it doesn’t oblige me to repeat it a fourth time.” He went away satisfied that now he was the legal owner of sparkling gold ring. 

I was reminded of this story when an acquaintance of mine told me the other day that this year he had a guilt-free Diwali. A diabetic, he said he could gorge himself on sweets because he found a shop that made a variety of delicious sugar-free sweets. I didn’t want to spoil his glorious mood by asking him questions about the hideous amounts of fat, cholesterol, salt, artificial colours, and chemical taste enhancers that he would be letting in along with the so-called sugar-free sweets.

How easy it is for us to persuade ourselves when we want to do something desperately and we know we shouldn’t! We frame the issue in a way that we can avoid looking at its ugly side. We may be stark naked, but if we manage to get half a fig leaf and hold it strategically, we convince ourselves that our modesty is fully protected.

Happy, guilt-free Diwali!