Dear Friends,
Let me first offer my sincere regards to the former President of India and great philosopher Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan on the eve of the Teacher’s Day that is celebrated on 5th September, i.e. his birthday, every year in his memory. Personally, I would like to take this opportunity to remember my own teachers who introduced me to life and its meaning, who guided me to the path of public service, and who let me understand the meaning of human existence and dignity.
Dr. Radhakrishnan had a strong belief in the sanctity of work and ethics of profession, and he had expressed this before the members of accountancy profession once in Chennai (then, Madras): My feeling is that whatever may be our profession, it is our duty in these critical days to carry out what we do in a spirit of utter rectitude, honesty and detachment. Checkpoint question for all of us, at present, is: Do we find it odd, strange or nostalgic when we hear such thoughts? If our answer is in affirmative, we need to change the fundamentals of our existence. It is strange that diligent and ethical execution of duty is often considered exceptional today, i.e. not normal, which is nothing but what we expect from others. For every right, there will be a comparable civil responsibility.
It has become a matter of greater concern for us how to restrict the limits of our responsibility. We appear to be afraid of our responsibility, our duty, which is nothing but just the other side of rights, according to the celebrated author Pearl S. Buck. When we are young, we want to grow up in order to have more freedom as we feel constrained. But, when we grow up, we become nostalgic about our childhood when we had no responsibility. We basically do not like freedom that comes to us with responsibility. American industrialist-philanthropist John Rockefeller who made it very big in his life and, later, gave half of what he earned back to his society, conscientiously agrees: I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty. Introducing bills after bills on rights in our democracy has made us a little compliant, it seems. For a change, why do not we think in the direction of introducing a bill on responsibilities?
All of us have a right to life, a fundamental right, which makes all other rights possible. Right to express our beliefs and opinions in public and in private is also fundamental to our existence in a civil society. And, along with these rights comes our duty and responsibility, which is part of our dignified and responsible coexistence. The word duty entails an act of obligation, as duty is work that we are obliged to perform for moral or legal reasons. Responsibility, however, has become disintegrative today that is coolly shifted to the shoulders of fate, luck or people from the circle of our existence. It is a sad social reality that everything righteous has turned out to be exceptional these days, which we should be worried about. Naturally, numerous instances of non-performance make examples of performances appear exceptional.
In such moments of difference and indifference, our profession can show a ray of hope to our society. In the very formative stage of our profession, ethics had been identified as an essential fundamental and social responsibility as a reality of the profession by our founding members. Let us vow to trade the path of ethics and be more duty-bound while presenting better examples before our society.
Now, let us look into the recent change and development with regard to the accountancy profession that has taken place in the past one month or so:
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