***What is common amongst President Bill Clinton, Reverend Jesse Jackson, the butcher of sutrapur and the ferocious man of Feni is that they have all shocked us with the unthinkable.***

IT was a high mark of hypocrisy, when a preacher had lost his own battle while trying to salvage the soul of another adulterer. Reverend Jesse Jackson, the celebrated civil rights leader and Christian minister of the USA, was having an extramarital affair with a woman while he was counselling President Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. If anything, the man, who was the first African American considered for the US Presidency, performed the black art of moral discrepancy. He didn't practise what he had preached.

One of the characters in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest pleads, "I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy." Those words proved prophetic in Wilde's own life as he would be accused of homosexuality and sent to prison. Thus hypocrisy has the mastery of a juggler about it when the double standards of Mr.

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are extrapolated within a single personality.

An Islamic scholar, who is visiting Bangladesh from Australia, tells me that hypocrisy is the mother of all evils. Perhaps the reason why it is true is that hypocrisy destroys identity and throws everything into a jumbled state of confusion. What are we supposed to make of a man who has performed Hajj, and is caught in the airport while smuggling deadly drugs into the country? How do you identify prostitutes, who run their business from respectable neighbourhoods? Where do you draw the line between the rational and the animal, when calculating men plant bombs in public meetings?

In simple words, hypocrisy is when the label tells something other than what the bottle holds. It's moral pretension when falsehood and deception prevaricates in order to prevail. But caliphs Omar and Harun-ar-Rashid used pretension to ascertain truth. They walked in disguise amongst the poor and the needy so that they could learn about the plights of their people. In certain cultures masque is a festival or entertainment in which disguised participants offer gifts to their host and then join together for a ceremonial dance. Therefore, it is not always bad if the label belies the bottle so long as the aim is not to deny the essence of what it contains.

According to the Bhagavata-

Purana, a Brahman who is not free from falsehood, hypocrisy, envy, aggression, and pride cannot be the highest of men, and many persons of low social status may have some advantage over him in moral attitude and behaviour. In a way, hypocrisy is the womb where other vices are conceived and cultivated. But even worse, as W Somerset

Maugham explained, hypocrisy cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it's a whole-time job. The proof of that pudding is in eating. If you look at the politicians, you can tell how it happens.

So, hypocrisy is adulteration of truth and falsehood with malafide intentions. In recent times, a killer has expressed his horror at the cruelty of the crime of which he is accused. During police interrogation, he is said to have compared the atrocities of the butchery of cutting a

up two young men to those committed by the Pakistan army in 1971. In the same manner, a political leader has defended himself against the charges brought against him by a journalist who is lying in a hospital bed after being seriously wounded by his goons. While the victim claims to have been beaten up by his men, the politician is blaming it

on victim's family feud masquerading himself as the misunderstood benefactor.

At the root of hypocrisy then is a twist, where appearance is more important than essence. The power of a chameleon lies in its eyes, and a blind chameleon cannot change its colours. A hypocrite finds his strength in greed, because what corrupts him is the indomitable urge to covet. He wants what he likes, and he is ready to take on any colours to get what he likes. For him convenience is the art of survival,

and conscience is its first casualty. American political philosopher Hannah Ardent explained, "Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core." Hypocrisy is, thus, a moral disaster, when all values are destroyed in the name of serendipity. Even a criminal is committed to his crime and takes responsibility for its consequences. But the hypocrite is footloose, who does what suits his purpose and is comfortable with his peripatetic morality.

The Islamic scholar whom I met last week also told me that divers lose sight of colours as they incrementally descend into the deep sea. First they lose sight of red, then yellow, green and blue until they are engulfed by the black colours of the stygian darkness. Hypocrisy is the lowest point in the nether region of moral depravity, where everything is coated in darkness, because one cannot tell the difference between right and wrong as all things are judged within the scope of opportunity.

In that sense, hypocrites are worst kind of criminals who do two wrongs in one mischief. They commit the crime and then justify it either through change of value or by passing the blame on a scapegoat. They portend evil and at the same time pretend innocence for it. But the worst thing about them is how they remain unperturbed by the

whole thing. How they perpetrate evil, yet keep a straight face as if nothing had happened. Hypocrisy is the deadliest ailment of the soul, when the conscience degenerates under the onslaught of an eclectic moral system.

When Jesse Jackson, himself the illegitimate son of a white planter and a slave girl, fathered an illegitimate child with one of his colleagues at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, he gave in to that eclectic system where a philandering president completed his second term at the height of his glory. How did it happen? Is hypocrisy contagious? Did it pass to Jesse Jackson from his celebrated confessor? Was it a temptation hidden in the flesh of the noted priest all the time and then encouraged to leap out all of asudden while handling the moral failure of an illustrious president?

What is common amongst President Bill Clinton, Reverend Jesse Jackson, the butcher of Sutrapur and the ferocious man of Feni is that they have all shocked us with the unthinkable. Some of them did the gory, while others did the grisly, but each of them did something grotesque, which violated the fundamental values of human society.

On the surface, their misdeeds embodied two of the primal instincts: sex and violence, where the animal overpowered the rational and committed the sin. But hypocrisy is when the rational overpowers itself, and helps the animal flee the crime scene. If you think about it, it is as loathsome as shooting your enemy in the back. You will hit the target, but miss the glory.