Volume 5 · The Great Indian Bazaar · Essay 206

Right Yardstick

You may not know the name Right Yardstick, but you know the thing. This page only introduces the two of you formally.

It is worth keeping in your pocket not because it is always right, but because it is always available. A tool you carry beats a perfect tool you left at home.

Strip it to the floor and you find an old instruction: look carefully, judge slowly, act decently. The new name exists because the old instruction keeps being forgotten.

Watch how a rumour travels in a hostel: it gains one detail per room and loses one truth per floor. By the fourth floor it is unrecognisable, and by dinner it is fact.

Society is a long conversation; the only question is whether you are listening or merely waiting to speak. And when you forget it — you will — the world will remind you. It is a faithful tutor.