A couple of weeks ago, I had to travel by a night bus from Chennai to Coimbatore.  It was a private bus, and we, some twenty odd passengers were waiting for the announcement.  It was around thirty minutes that we had on hand.

A few introductions took place.  When my turn came, one young man mistook me for a priest in a local Hindu temple, after seeing ear-rings in both my ears.  I did explain to him that I was a teacher in a college in Coimbatore and that it was a custom in our community for men above fifty years to wear ear-rings, most of the time, for concentration.

He gave me a lot of respect and then the topic turned towards corruption.  The young man was neatly dressed, and talked proudly about how he swung a deal for this company by paying the purchase guy of the firm.  Another person, who introduced himself as a Marketing executive in a Coimbatore based firm, congratulated him and told him to do the same so that he could win more deals!

It later transpired that the two were regular passengers who knew each other.  When I objected to the practice, and said that he had compromised on his company's integrity, pat came the reply that the Management had actually prodded him to do so and, actively encouraged him.  When I asked him as to whether the quality of raw materials was good, he replied in the affirmative and said that even rival firms had the same quality and he could not differentiate his firm.  Hence, the short-cut!

When quizzed further, he named the Foundry Division of an excellent auto component group, as one of his customers.  I knew this organization so well, since I had served in the very same organization for over a decade in Human Resources Management, in a senior position.  I did not tell the young man that I was associated with that organization.  Instead, I asked him if he could penetrate that organization.  He said they were old customers and hence the question of bribe did not occur!

Further questioning revealed that his former boss was a very honest person, who had swung the deal for the organization with the Foundry Division, by repeatedly visiting them with samples, and then proving to them that the product was simply superb.  He quit when under-hand deals had begun to happen.

Now, the times had changed, there was a new boss, who was the exact opposite of the former boss, who wanted quick results like a flash!

This was just one instance of compromise that I had heard in the past one year.  Deal after deal is done in broad daylight.  There are several men who approach me, promising a cut in fees paid by students, if only they could get some students to join their engineering college!  The problem is, the college itself is just five years old, there is no effort at brand building or values building. 

Everywhere, there are short-cuts.  You name the organization or the institution or the service provider or just about anything, and there is corruption of a tall order.

The younger generation have gone one step further.  I was stumped for any answer when a girl who was just nineteen quizzed me if sex before marriage was such a big crime.  She quickly added that she had done no wrong, but her classmate had "enjoyed' sex with her cousin, and had done that 'very carefully".

I did point out that the very act of her friend itself was wrong.  She pointed out that her friend's father had divorced her mother long ago, and she hated any man.  However, her cousin was such a nice person, and hence she longed for her affection and did what she is never meant to do, before marriage.

In this case, the mother was the one who needed counseling.  When I reached the mother, she was shocked to hear the story, promising me that she would never reveal my name, but would try to reason out with her daughter.

Gradually, the daughter broke down, and told the entire truth.  The mother was very wise.  She called over the cousin, and his parents.  They have now promised to get the two married, since the family of the cousin is a very rich one.  In fact, the cousin's father actually apologized to the mother of the girl.

While such events do occur, it is not so common to find the parents of the boy, being so kind.  They would tend to pin everything on the girl, with disastrous consequences. It has become a fashion to engage in sex before marriage.

This is a very unhealthy trend and has to be stopped anyway.  Likewise, it is common to see a huge number of films showing a dada kind of figure, who would easily bash up even sixty bad guys at any point in time.  This is so much removed from reality but youngsters tend to ape such dangerous trends, with disastrous results.

A time has come to really think afresh about the various ways in which we could put an end to violence in our society, which, by itself, is a big decline in the values, that were cherished for generations.  Violence only brings in more violence, leading to disaster of unmanageable proportions. We need a mechanism to put an end to this menace as well.

Yet another very dangerous trend of the youngsters is to constantly poke fun at elders, give them scant respect in public.  They tend to forget that they would also become old one day.  Similarly, the attitude of every single person, in making every single place, very dirty, is highly deplorable.

We also need to address such a vital issue, impressing upon people, that they do not have any right to make public places dirty, and do not have any values, if they do so.

Values are always non-negotiable.  One cannot be traded for the other.  Values are values, and need to be cherished, if our society needs to flourish.  We need to understand that many things that are considered rituals or norms of culture, particularly things related to praying to God, being pious and so on, need to be preserved.  In the name of modernity, we should not destroy them.

Let us wake up and so something about preserving values, right now.