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how honest are we? a recent reader's digest study says 6.7.

rd reporters deliberately mislaid 960 phones across 30 countries of the world, to see how many would be returned, and how the finders would behave. the results were interesting, and in some cases, quite unexpected. ljubljana, slovenia ranked first on the list, with only 1 of the 30 phones left unreturned. surprisingly (i thought) mumbai tied for 5th place with new york and manila. 24/30 phones were returned.

as one would expect, wealth did not guarantee honesty. while a rich woman in auckland grabbed the mobile and bolted, a cold-drinks vendor in mumbai made an attempt to return the lost phone. young people were just as dishonest as the old, and women were more likely to return the phones than men (though that's not surprising). all in all, it was a heartening study, and reinforced some bit of lost faith in the goodness of humankind. a 52 year-old hungarian said, "you find things and you lose things, but you never lose your honesty."

it sucks to lose one's wallet, keys etc. (i would know - i lose my keys at least once a day, on average) but it's heartening to know that there are people around the world who would not shy away from doing a good deed. a while ago, my room-mate's keys were lost. thankfully, they were on a princeton key-chain, and the person who found the keys mailed them to princeton's main office. princeton looked up the id on the key-chain and mailed it back to my room-mate (all the way across the continent to stanford). god bless them.

i'd like to appreciate the honesty in each one of you, across the world. and if you're not so honest, think about it this way - a simple act on your part could earn you someone's goodwill for a long, long time. isn't it worth the effort and the sacrifice (of something that was not yours to begin with)?