Abhijit Majumder editor of MiD DAY, Delhi, Abhijit Majumder looks at trust and its side-effects
Abhijit Majumder editor of MiD DAY, Delhi, Abhijit Majumder looks at trust and its side-effects
FOR a long while after
MiD DAY first published the story of a Noida business school boy leaking his classmate-cum-girlfriend's striptease video on e-mail, it was the most-looked-up topic on the web from India.
There are questions on editorial ethicsu00a0whether it was right for us to carry the story, whether publishing the girl's face-blurred photo was proper, whether we salvaged any moral ground by not naming the girl, boy or their institute but I'm putting that aside for another article or discussion.
For now, let us talk trust.
Trust has been the most acclaimed part of a relationship's architecture. It is known to keep two people together through jealousy, misunderstanding and suchlike and stop the relationship from caving in.
By that logic, the 23-year-old girl (younger when videotaped) did nothing wrong. She trusted. To reckless perfection, one would say: there was no doubt in her mind that she and the boy were part of an immortal, celestial bond in which a few seconds of stylish stripping on camera were but a playful dot on a large scrapbook of memories.
So, what went wrong?
What goes wrong in almost every relationship when time extracts its share of lustre?
Trust is invariably betrayed in relationships. The most obvious forms are when one starts fancying somebody else, talks badly about the partner or exposes a thing that he or she had been entrusted with.
In Ian McEwan's Amsterdam, friends Vernon Halliday (editor) and Clive Linley (composer), who had both dated dead journalist Molly Lane, get on to a destructive trip to stop her other ex-lover, right-wing politician Julian Garmony, from being Prime Minister.
Halliday is bent on publishing Garmony's private photos taken by Molly in transvestite clothing, and thereby betraying her trust. As a sub-genre of betrayal, it is somewhat akin to the Noida sex clip case.
There are, however, far subtler but equally chilling forms of betrayal of trust. Boredom, for instance. You are never meant to be bored or detached or indifferent, ever, about the person you are dating. But even our most harmonious parents are guilty of that.
Don't you trust your partner to never be not-as-excited about you?
Relationships are made of the darkest magic. Unless you try them out, you won't know the fantastic lights that light up your sky. But that most deliriously stunning magic happens because at that moment somebody is throwing let me guess dried snakeskin, unicorn blood and a dead fox's hair into an evil stew, muttering two names under the breath.
But after the light-and-sound show, the magic peels off. Trust is betrayed. Sex clips are sent to an entire mailing list. People living in the same house make love like weary robots once in many cold weeks.
So, do we stop trusting?
Alas, we don't have a choice in the matter. Who wants to go through a loveless, hollow life? Who wants paranoid loneliness?
One must trust. But it is safe to have the strength to be betrayed, to imagine a life beyond pain even when one's most intimate moments are being beamed or discussed callously in a cafu00e9.
We hope stories like the Noida sex clip make youngsters a little more careful about the new accessories of betrayal, but I guess Coldplay puts it simply in one of its singles:u00a0 "So you lost your trust/And you never should have."
