It’s a good thing the moral police, in Chennai, Benaras or wherever, do not seem too hot on chat shows. If they were, there is one episode of the erstwhile Simi Garewal show they would certainly have had much to say about. This one featured sitarist Ravi Shankar, his wife Sukanya, and their daughter, Anoushka. The story that emerged, unconventional by any standards, was that Sukanya fell in love with the famous sitarist who was not only many years her senior but also in liaisons with other women. Seeing no future with Shankar, however, she married another man and moved to London. The affair, though, continued, resulting in a child, Anoushka. And at some point Shankar, coming to realise his responsibilities, accepted both mother and child.Anyone moved by the projected story of Sukanya’s unconditional love for the musician and its happy fate, would be saddened to read this month’s issue of Society magazine. In it we meet the missing piece in the tale, namely Sukanya’s ex-husband, Narendra Kotiyan. In an interview, Kotiyan not only makes accusations of deceit and manipulation against his ex-wife but maintains that the events recounted, far from being a dignified unraveling of a complex situation, as it was portrayed, were traumatic for him.There is much that he says about his ex-wife’s behaviour that we may or may not choose to believe, given that it is one person’s word against another. But it would be hard to deny that his sentiments have been rudely obliterated in the telling of the unusual romance. So what is Sukanya guilty of? Did she lie, as Kotiyan claims? Or did she just, as the marketing industry would describe it, ‘‘put a spin on the story’’. How wrong is that?And doesn’t everyone do it these days? Presenting one’s best face. Glossing over or denying the grey areas and the negatives. Making a self-serving story out of events even if it means leaving out a few inconvenient details.For the last few weeks the Mumbai police have been preparing a case of attempted murder against the aspiring film actress Preeti Jain, with lie detector tests, personal diaries and other evidence. Two days ago, however, Jain gets out on bail and gives a slew of interviews claiming that the police are using her to frame don turned politician, Arun Gawli.IAS officer Nidhi Pandey accused her husband, Deepak, then ADC to the Maharashtra Governor, of extreme physical and mental torture in what became a high-profile case. This week, Deepak Pandey called the press and handed out press kits containing pictures of the couple in happier days to disprove her charges.Who is lying and who is telling the truth? Or does it all depend on the spin?Increasingly, this is how it seems. Our institutions of justice, the police, the judiciary, have seen a severe erosion of credibility over the years. And the media, for the most part, seems content to present both sides of any story with little attempt at independent verification. In any case, substantial evidence is hard and slow to come by while claims are easy, both to make and broadcast. By the time convincing proof emerges, if it ever does, the harm is done and the story has moved on. This is probably why the revelations of false claims about missing Weapons of Mass Destruction did not affect the electoral fortunes of George Bush or Tony Blair the way they might have been expected to. People appear to have acquired a tolerance for deception. Indeed, they have come to expect it.The revelations, last year, that cycling champion Lance Armstrong — an inspirational figure who had battled with cancer and other disabilities — had used performance enhancing drugs were shocking for his many fans the world over. Armstrong, of course, denied the accusations. Commenting on his case as well as those of sprinter Kelli White and Olympic cyclist Tyler Hamilton before him, all caught up in similar claims and counter claims, Selena Roberts in The New York Times wrote that ‘‘a firm denial has lost its credibility when every culprit claims innocence.’’ The hypocrisy, she believed, seemed ‘‘pathological’’ among stars and yet, she claimed, ‘‘we desperately want to believe in their innocence.’’ Bishop O Conner, a leading clergyman, when asked about the future of faith, in the aftermath of the election of the new pope, said on the BBC’s Hard Talk that for him the ‘‘worrying thing about contemporary Europe is ‘relativism’’’. ‘‘Truth is what is true for ME. There is no concept of truth as something objective — something we all believe.’’Indeed, the tendency to sacrifice the fact for the story is leading to a world of constantly shifting illusions. As with everything, even truth now comes with multiple options.
