With Uncertain Origins Of Information, I Choose To Form My Own Opinions

“No means no!” she exclaims. A quiet descends over the gathering. Some uneasy shifting. I can feel my beer warming up in my hands. Someone makes an attempt to change the subject.

“Yes, but where does that take us…?” I pursue. “Does that mean that every kind of romantic pursuit must be abandoned at the first sign of rejection?”

My colleague rolls her eyes and goes on to enlighten us, “Of course, that’s what it means! Every woman must know right from the start who she likes and who she doesn’t like. When she knows she doesn’t like someone, she must emphatically say the word ‘no’ and the guy must stop doing whatever he is doing: pursuing her, talking to her, making love to her, whatever, because, no means no!”

That’s some circular logic, I wonder. ‘No means no’  because, well, ‘no means no’. I sip my beer and look around me. It’s an airy night on our rooftop. We’re all sitting in a circle, sipping our choice of poison and listening to music. My husband and I are entertaining some colleagues from his law firm. We’re all lawyers here: educated, practicing, doing well for ourselves. Somehow the conversation had steered to the ‘Me Too’ movement.

Someone marvelled at how it had taken everyone by surprise, to which someone asked whether it would survive in this limitless, disorderly, war-path. These musings were brought to an abrupt end by the war cry of our now red-faced companion, ‘no means no!’

I can see that my first attempt to re-ignite the discussion of limits has not gone down well, particularly with the ladies. I try a different approach. Do we agree that the moment an artist is called out for being a predator we are to shut him out and discredit everything about him, including his art? Does this mean we must stop watching his movies, listening to his music or reading his books?

I am unsuccessful. My opponent’s face has turned from red to crimson. All the other women in the circle are looking equally annoyed. I know what they are thinking: why must she question a movement that is so important to thousands of women across the world: haven’t we suffered enough already?

The short answer: I must question because I care.

The word doing the round these days is ‘post-truth’: a supposedly novel uncertainty that exists in today’s world about true facts because of the uncertain origins of information in the public space, media, social media, internet. Competing accounts exist in today’s India of almost every event, occurrence or happening, with members of the polity free to consume any version of the truth that agrees with them.

It is possible that the avalanche of information that hits us every day numbs us, leaving us capable of retaining only the loudest or most sensational forms of expression. Screaming news anchors, superlative tag-lines, sexual or violent hashtags. So, when we think of the ‘Me too’ movement, we remember ‘no means no!’ and since all the rest is a maze of information with no roadmap, we don’t bother to analyse it.

But what is education if not a curtailing of such primordial instincts with logic and rationale. Let’s think. What do we know, what have we learnt (philosophical credit, ‘Go Goa Gone’)? We know that Galileo was beheaded for saying that the earth revolves around the sun. That must have been the kind of world in which scientific temperament was confronted with untamed societal self-righteousness. Sound familiar?

So, what can we do to avert the disastrous consequences of irrational sensationalism? You got it! We can question. Question everything: what we receive, how we receive it and why we receive it. Not only as isolated islands in a sea of virtual reality. But together. Together we are greater than our individual selves. If each of us knows only some part of the elephant, together we can figure out the whole of it. Once we put our thoughts out into the world, we will hear them echo or break against the thoughts of another. Slowly, with patience, we will reach a likely version of the truth. That’s all we need and all we can do.

This is the only way I know of building my own character – of internalising the world around me in a way that defines what I am. Because what I am not, for certain, is a mute sponge for all the murky information that splatters on the street from every window. So, I will question, and reason, and listen, and talk, till I am sure of what I know and sure of what I don’t know. In other words, heaven help you if you find yourself sitting on my rooftop and sipping a beer on a pleasant spring evening. 😀