Am I ready to blog on “He was so transparent that …?

Our 52-week project admins came up with this week’s theme, “He was transparent that …..” and suggested that we write an article using that sentence. My initial reaction about this topic was that it could be male bashing as one of the fellow members pointed out but I have been observing that many of them are based on love. And here is my transparent story.

He was so transparent that it was very difficult to find fault with him. He had built his name around transparency and he thought of it as a weapon to deal with people. His transparency and simplicity would always endear him to everybody. Faculty and students could always come with their problems both personal and professional to him and he would listen patiently and try to help them. He learnt over the years that listening to their problems with sympathy would always create empathy between them.

This transparency gave him the freedom to think, to shout at them, to chide them and to mend them. And it gave him a lot of confidence, though it could be misplaced in this selfish world that we live among.

And he always thought, Oh My God, is it necessary to be nice in this selfish world where people would call him at the middle of the night and complain that there was no power in the hostel, the warden call in the night and tell him that a student had drunk a mosquito repellant because he had not prepared for the next day’s class test, a faculty call and cry that she was abused by the parents in the middle of the night since she had scolded their ward and the student had threatened to commit suicide, a single parent committed suicide because her son was not studying properly in spite of her poverty.

And because he was so transparent, it showed on him. Listening to their problems, thinking about them always, trying to solve them, and trying to understand how they would react led to a deterioration in his health.

Was this transparency necessary in the first place?