To rebel against authority could be a normal thing for some people. That cannot be called a wrong attitude when the act of authority is unjust or unreasonable. But to rebel when the authority is right and one is wrong is definitely an attitudinal problem. We had a wonderful Dean who was quite conscious about conserving resources and recycling things. That Dean had vision. Recycling is talked of quite a lot these days, but was quite a novelty in those days. It was the Dean’s idea to open out old envelopes, turn them inside out and stick them so that they could be used again. I had used a number of envelopes like that. She also would ask us to send her letters on a quarter or a half sheet of paper, if the letters were short. The idea was that the remaining sheets could be used for writing another time. However there was one Head of a department who took offense when he was asked by her to get his letters typed on sheets of appropriate size. He would get the letters typed on standard sized paper, and the cut off the blank parts of the sheets. But instead of keeping the blank portions for future use, he would tear them up and throw them in the dustbin. Something was seriously wrong with his attitude. I don’t know what he achieved by such behavior. He did not teach the Dean a lesson as he probably wanted to, because she never knew what he actually did. He showed himself in poor light to others who watched him do this. He set a bad example to those who did not understand what the Dean meant by her instructions and trusted him instead. He wasted resources, for which the taxpayer had paid.
