Lance-Cheat-Strong

So, another hero fallen from the grace, he was an inspiration to millions across the world, the symbol of hope for cancer patients and sport-people.He was the guy who bought the cycling out of the French National TV to the world Stage.

Seven time champion, unblemished record. He is also the author of a number of books on his struggle against cancer and consequent triumph. He must be thinking twice on that now, huh.

There is a famous Quote by one of the former Prime ministers of UK

“You can fool some people all the time or all the people some time, but u can never fool all the people all the time”.

There are indeed hounds living within us who are deep rooted in the reality and who are not carried away by the fairy-tale stories of success. While the ordinary guys spends his life measuring himself against the standards of their fake success these hard-nosed people look into the trash bins of these .Salute to their passion and zeal in unearthing  the truth,come what may.

I too had my share of cheating; we all at some point or other are forced to do some correction for covering up the aberrations that prop up now and then. But what matters is how you are affected by that, after sinning or during the process. How your psyche reacts to your cheating, or how your perception of you as a person is affected. These are indeed meta-physical things but then this is how the things spell out. A small 250 odd gm split walnut kernel controls every twitch in the body, so we should be aware what goes into it. 

I  have an anecdote to share which was my first brush with cheating and how it backfired on me.

Once upon a time in college, me and my friends the close ones (who scored the same grades as me) by some lucky chance got the question paper of our final exam in my 7th semester, I will not mention the subject because then some of my college-mates may un-friend me on Face book. So it was it in front of me by the evening before the exams , sweet 10 questions written in blue ink on a plain A4 sheet, I checked  my Xeroxes whether I had the answers or not.So far so great. Now began the struggle. All my college life, I had average grades nothing fancy. It was always difficult for me put myself to study the Xerox copies.

So, accordingly it appeared to me as a boon. But was it? Let’s see.

The moment I got the paper, first reaction was yawn...Smiling of course, and then the three of us sat watching a newly released Bollywood movie. It took another 3 hours of our time. So, till 9 pm my brain cells were absorbing the audio-visual treat of Indian cinema. After 9 PM what next?  You grab your notes, run to your room, curse yourself for wasting time, get under the quilt and start mugging. Ideally that was the plan, but that was not meant to happen.

Now you must be thinking that why I am bringing this story up, the reason is that it was straight forward cheating on our part. And it was the closest I have ever come to this menace of cheating/embezzling/forgery etc.

So,next after leaving the cinema hall( I mean my friends room, lest Andaz Apna Apna may again get released), I picked up  my share of notes out of the pile and dragged myself out to study quietly in my room. I switched on the lights, pulled over the quilt , took good  5 minutes to decide in which position I should study, I mean on the table or on bed on my belly or the on my back with pillows propping up my neck. But it was indeed a useless exercise as with 5 minutes I tried all the three positions at least three times , o the writing on the wall was clear, I ain't in the mood, it was like I had lost complete control of myself, I tried to instil fear into me thinking like may be the paper will get changed etc,you need best grades  and other useless stuff .But nothing of this worked within less than 10 minutes three of us were again in front of the laptop. Searching every NEW FOLDER (if you know what I mean)  ever created on the machine. But finally the old boys decided in favour of a time tested bond movie.So,again the Bitch named time sat on the rocket and boom , the clock shows 11.30 PM(Including 2 mini bio-breaks, and 1 very natural but hazardous calls from nature, blame the acidic hostel food). Its 11.30 Pm and yours truly is still motivating himself to study at least those questions that are actually going to come into the exam. Later on I figured it would have taken me just over 2 hours to mug them up, but alas we can connect the dots only backwards.  Then I figured that maybe I should take a nap and wake up in the morning too study, as if after waking up these are going to be any interesting, I put the alarm on my mobile as 4 am. And guess what,I woke up at  3.45 am, then again closed my eyes thinking that there is still time , and that was where the Battle of Waterloo was lost by Napoleon, next thing I know I am being woken up my friends just in time so that I can change in to some decent  clothes to leave for college , on the way I finally opened my notes and used probably for the first time in the history of mankind the 100% of my brain capacity to remember every conceivable jargon ever invented in that subject. But fortunately I had studied well in the previous hourly’s so there was 20% retention of those portions and I finally managed to score well (of course having good terms with the examiner helped) . So, having known the paper well ahead of time didn't work out well for me or for that instance anybody. That was one of the very good lessons I learned the hard way during my four short years in college.

This was the comedy part, but what went inside me while I was roaming around with the LEVEL 3 Classified Paper. Believe me it was not good. The worst part was that I couldn't due to some obvious reasons reveal the paper to others (I mean other than the two close friends who actually provided me with the Nuclear Secret). So that evening on dinner table I was actually for the first time having difficulty to have eye to eye conversation with my batch-mates. It was harrowing for a guy who was known to have a loose tongue in every respect.

Cheating never worked for me……fortunately

But here we come across a case of a Super Star whose entire extra-ordinary career is based on the foundation of cheating, bullying and deceit. The  guy who doing this also made remarkable quotes, wrote fancy auto-biographies, which indeed became New York times best sellers; read “ It’s not about the bike” of course  it was  about the Syringes, “Every second counts”  may be each shot .

I recently watched the video of Lance’s interview by Oprah. Oprah Winfrey is an Afro- American icon, her talk show is one the most watched shows in America.  And going by some surveys she is currently the most powerful or influential women (beats Sonia Gandhi, Mamta Banerjee and Behenji quite surprising). I had never just taken notice as I had no intention of listening to the blabbering personalities. But believe me she is quite a woman. Her interview with Lance was as if Chitrgupt from the Heaven itself had incarnated just to interrogate him.

And there was no warm up period given to the Champion, questions were shot from the word go. Within just five 20 seconds one gets to know the tone of the interview, she was the DOMNATRIX right from the beginning. The bully was being bullied.  The most exciting or you can say the controversial part which people were looking forward to see was the confession part. Had it been a Indian talk show, our Coffee with Cougar (no pun intended) would have kept that part for the last and may be for week till the channel got its share of eyeballs , but surprisingly this was the first Jacuzzi launched in line of many.

"Yes or No"

 There was no lie-detector test, one look to Lance’s face answered it all, and yes he had done it.

He had cheated the whole world into believing his Herculean triumph.

We the fools......