The Kural in life
A life on two short lists.
After all the praise and argument, Valluvar closes the chapter with a stripped-down rule: what is fit to do is virtue; what is fit to shun is whatever brings blame. Two columns, and every act lands in one. The simplicity is the point — when a choice is murky, the question is rarely hard, only uncomfortable.
Blame as the compass.
Valluvar defines the avoidable not as 'sin' in the abstract but as 'pazhi' — what draws blame. It is a wonderfully usable test. You may not always know the metaphysics of a deed, but you can usually feel whether it would stand naming, whether you'd own it aloud. The flush of anticipated blame is an honest early-warning system.
The chapter folds into a single habit.
Everything earlier — virtue ranks highest, don't forget it, do it now, daily, cleanly — resolves here into one reflex: before acting, sort. Is this on the do side or the shun side? Practised often enough, the sorting stops being a deliberation and becomes a way of seeing, the moral grammar running quietly beneath choice.
The chapter closes by reducing virtue to a usable rule.
Valluvar ends the chapter on the strength of virtue with a summarising couplet: for a person, what should be done is virtue, and what should be shunned is whatever brings blame. Parimelazhagar notes the verse 'fixes' both — it settles, in one line, both the doing and the avoiding, leaving the reader a portable test for any act.
Sort each act: do, or shun?
Carry the chapter as one habit. Before an act, ask which list it belongs to — the doing or the shunning — using blame as your compass: would this stand being named aloud? It won't resolve every hard case, but it cuts through most, where the answer was clear and only the will was wavering.