How bad can a good thing be?

How bad can a good thing be?
28 Sep, 2007, 0000 hrs IST

My bank’s relationship manager emails weekly parables - simple stories with a moral lesson - to his customers.

This week he sent this:

A father wanted to inculcate a sense of responsibility in his careless son. So he told him that for every careless act of his he would hammer a nail into a wooden pillar in their house, and for every positive act he would pull out one nail.

The boy saw that the pillar was getting crowded with nails, so he resolved to change his behaviour and soon the nails started coming out, till there were none left. The father was very proud. He said, "Son, you have done a great job, there are no more nails left on the pillar." The boy, however, started crying and replied, "The nails are gone but the holes remain."

The fable’s obviously been made up to teach a few pithy lessons such as that some mistakes are part of the learning process and may be unavoidable; or, mistakes even when corrected, leave marks forever. Also, that some mistakes are just not correctable and the price paid is very heavy - for example, carelessness while crossing the street can cost a life. etc.

However, if we leave out the boy’s last comment and halt the story at him just crying after there were no more nails left, we can discover an altogether different kind of message running through the story.

For instance, could he have begun crying because it might suddenly have dawned on him that there were no more mistakes left to be corrected? Because in that case he must have also realised his good behaviour and deeds were not as spontaneous as he believed they were.

Instead, the positive acts were those of redemption goaded by his earlier irresponsible behaviour that had nailed him to the wooden pillar in the first place. (The reason for crying could also have been due to the fact that once he knew his impetus for doing good arose from un-good acts, it turned out to be not a great feeling to live with.)

Something similar had happened to Emperor Ashok too, the man they used to call murderous and heartless. On the battlefield of Kalinga when he saw the scattered corpses - basically his own set of nails - he is supposed to have cried out, "What have I done?" Indeed, what had he? And so he spent the rest of his life pulling out one nail after another till there were none.

Could Ashok have been greater if he had been virtuous to begin with and had not required gutted soldiers to remind him he was doing something wrong? He could. That’s another moral of the relationship manager’s parable.