Truth detectors

Aldrich Ames beat the polygraph test,not once,but twice. And he wasn’t the only spy to do so. But Harold J. Nicholson failed a routine polygraph test,and was subsequently exposed. The polygraph or “lie detector” in common parlance,despite scientific demonstrations of its very questionable accuracy,lies entrenched in popular culture.

Before Fox Network’s The Moment of Truth,there has been Lie Detector — launched in the ’50s,and put back on air as recently as 1998,courtesy Fox again. Some say it’s schadenfreude: Theodor Adorno’s “largely unanticipated delight in the suffering of another”. Some say it’s our instinctive thrill at other people washing their dirty linen right before our eyes. Somewhere down the line,there’s perhaps also an argument for letting the “truth” out; never mind what we mean by it and what we make of it,as long as it’s some else’s truth. Thus we now have our own televised moments of close encounters with personal ghosts,our own Sach ka Saamna.

But what we make of truth,or how we receive certain kinds of truth,matters in that self-same

Story continues below this ad

domain of popular culture. At least,that’s what our MPs would have us believe as they routinely rake up the issue of obscenity,of what befits “Indian culture”. And it’s not that the clamour against disconcerting disclosures is without merit. The US original of Sach ka Saamna has ruined marriages and families. Is an indescribably more closed Indian society up to watching a woman — truly,gender always matters here! — “fail” the test even as she denies having contemplated adultery on screen (with her husband watching offstage),since the prior polygraph record gives the lie to her public claim? Or the possible fallibility of a cricketing legend?

The usefulness of truth-telling is always tailed by the perceived need to curb the ambit of revelation. The debate on how far we can persist in truth on Indian reality television has just begun to unfold.