By Robert Clements
Repair the House, Don’t Paint the Cracks..!
It’s always easier to live in a lie, isn’t it? Like the fellow who notices cracks creeping up the walls of his home. Instead of calling in the mason, mixing cement, and getting his hands dirty, he buys a can of ivory paint. With a few bold strokes, the house gleams again—at least on the surface.
That, I fear, is where we stand as a nation today. We are busy painting cracks instead of repairing walls.
The Lie of Appearances
Turn on the television and what do you see? Smiling leaders shaking hands in China. Crisp suits, red carpets, staged photographs where the backdrop seems brighter than the faces. Anchors gush as if they’ve personally been invited to the banquet. Newspapers print columns of praise. WhatsApp forwards fly around with captions screaming, “India respected worldwide!”
But pause a moment. Are we really respected? Or are we, like that freshly painted but crumbling house, simply fooling ourselves?
The danger of lies isn’t that they’re told. The danger is when we start believing them. We begin building castles in the air, planting our tricolour flags on those clouds, and marching around proclaiming, “Superpower!” Reality, of course, chuckles. While we strut about with borrowed feathers, the world quietly measures our real weight—and the scales don’t tilt in our favour.
The Brutal Reality
Respect cannot be photo-shopped. It isn’t built with Instagram reels of leaders hugging each other. It isn’t earned by being hosted in dragon palaces or walking down red carpets. True respect comes the old-fashioned way: by proving yourself through action, consistency, dignity, and substance.
And what do the headlines really say? Students assaulted in Ireland. Our workers mistreated in the Middle East. Our athletes ignored in Australia. Our voice drowned out at global summits. The same countries we flatter with staged photographs treat us with dismissive shrugs once the flashbulbs fade.
Even the numbers don’t lie. Indices on press freedom, poverty, and education place us embarrassingly low. The world doesn’t see us as a giant; it sees us as a noisy teenager still trying to convince himself he’s grown.
Why Do We Cling to Illusions?
The answer, I suspect, lies in our sense of inferiority. For a few years, we fooled ourselves with the sweet wine of thinking we were a rising power. We loved the idea that the world envied us, admired us, and maybe even feared us. It was a narcotic, and once we were hooked, reality became too bitter to sip.
So we wrapped ourselves in illusions. Like the emperor in his famous “new clothes,” we paraded about half-naked, thrilled at how grand our garments looked, while the world smirked. We mistook mockery for applause, and in doing so, we built our pride not on stone but on air.
The Cost of Lies
But illusions are costly. When reality barges in, it does not knock softly. It storms through the door with headlines, statistics, and humiliations. A student beaten abroad is not just a news item—it is a mirror. An economy sliding down the charts is not just a number—it is a slap. Every insult unacknowledged, every failure painted over, is a warning sign ignored.
We can only paint cracks for so long. Sooner or later, the structure collapses. And then no amount of ivory paint can save the house.
Facing the Truth
So what must we do? First, stop believing our own propaganda. A nation is not strengthened by false praise. It is strengthened by confronting its weaknesses head-on. The cracks in our walls are real: poor infrastructure, weak institutions, divisive politics, compromised freedoms. To pretend otherwise is to play with collapse.
Second, we must earn respect the hard way. By improving education so our students don’t just flood foreign universities but excel in them. By building industries that export more than slogans. By treating our minorities and dissenters with fairness so that the world sees in us not hypocrisy but genuine democracy. By making policies that lift our poor instead of fattening a few businessmen.
Respect is never bought; it is built. Inch by inch. Truth by truth. Policy by policy.
The Danger of Living in a Lie
The greatest danger of living in a lie is not the ridicule of others. It is the blindness it causes within. Once we believe the painted wall is new, we forget the cracks underneath. We ignore the termites gnawing at the beams. We silence those who warn us, dismissing them as pessimists or “anti-nationals.” By the time we realize the danger, the house has already fallen.
The world is not fooled. It has eyes sharper than ours. It sees through our illusions faster than we imagine. It laughs not at our ambition but at our inability to distinguish ambition from arrogance, progress from propaganda.
A Call to Repair
It is time—long past time—to stop painting the cracks and start repairing the house. To face uncomfortable truths. To ask difficult questions. To hold our leaders accountable not for how many photo-ops they deliver, but for how many schools they build, how many jobs they create, how much dignity they protect.
Repairing is harder than painting. It means sweat, dust, and patience. It means admitting flaws. But only repaired houses stand through storms. Painted houses collapse.
And storms, let me remind you, are gathering. Global politics is shifting. Economies are tightening. Respect will not be given freely. It will have to be earned—or we will be pushed to the margins.
Final Word
We can no longer afford the luxury of lies. We cannot continue to clap at illusions while the walls crack. We must demand reality. We must build with truth. We must repair.
For if we don’t, the day the roof caves in, we won’t just lose a house. We will lose credibility, dignity, and the chance to stand tall in the world.
The danger of living in a lie is that truth always arrives. And when it does, it arrives mercilessly.
That truth, my friends, is already arriving—super fast..!
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