The Honesty Trap

What cities throw up in their Lost & Found

Ever heard of the wallet test? Its Readers Digests (RD) honesty yardstick which theyve been trying out in select countries since 1995. Last week,RD went full throttle and simultaneously dropped 12 wallets each in 16 cities worldwide,to see where the maximum number of lost wallets were returned to the owner. To the surprise of no one,Helsinki ranked first. But get this: Mumbai was second.

What? I hear you say,before you feel guilty and then appreciative. This is perfectly normal. Learning that the grimy city with 10 times our slums is swarming with selfless angels,is enough to shock the daylights out of Pune on a non-Thursday. Puneites are now forced to stop judging Mumbai and start judging themselves. We may share a love for the Deccan Queens tomato soup but our mental and physical make-up is very different from that of Mumbai. How would our city fare on the wallet test?

First,the person who found the wallet would strike up a discussion with the nearest reposing rickshaw-wallah. A small crowd would gather and earnest charcha would go on for a while. Shopkeepers would notice the commotion but instead of calling the cops,theyd pull down the shutters and take a three-hour nap to recover from the troubling sights of the day.

If a cop showed up out of curiosity,an elderly person would lecture him on doing his duty until he found a way to excuse himself from the scene. Eventually somebody would grudgingly take the wallet home and put up a signboard outside their house. We have the wallet belonging to so-and-so. Please bring five different photo IDs and dont ring the doorbell more than once,as we have to pay extra electricity charges.

And yet you can be sure that not a rupee would go missing. Or at least thats what we like to think. Puneites pride themselves on being so upright and having such high expectations of others,its a wonder nobody has pulled off the classic confidence trick on any of us here yet. (Then again,the average Puneri glare of suspicion is discouraging to the average trickster.)

What is the classic confidence trick,you may ask. In 1849,a man named William Thompson went around New York asking people if they trusted him enough to lend him their watches. Those were the days of mutually upright conduct and so several victims agreed only to realise that the man who had won their confidence was a professional confidence man,or con man,who never returned.

Wallets are often at the centre of such ruses,as anyone who has read a bit of PG Wodehouse will recognise. Like in his notorious plots,where impoverished waitresses have steely morals and wealthy Earls are not above a bit of pilfering,the real worlds rich and not-so-rich seem to be strangely unpredictable when faced with a fat wad of cash. Else how would the Indian city which epitomises struggle beat prosperous European rivals to the top of that list?

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The author is a chess grandmaster and former national champion

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