How to breach the right to privacy? Let me count the ways… Along with every other minority group I belong to, here’s another: in a universe of tech-savvy, click-happy downloaders, I belong to one of the most exclusive clubs in the world: those who haven’t seen the Singhvi CD.
I haven’t seen it because I choose not to. Not on aesthetic grounds alone but because I firmly believe that what happens between two consenting adults behind closed doors is no one else’s business — if it doesn’t concern public life.
One man’s sex life is another man’s pornography. Stick a camera in anyone’s bedroom, and whereas you might be regaled with a series of salacious images (unless the occupants happen to be a “happily married couple”), you will also be breaching one of the most fundamental and important rights of the human spirit.
Increasingly this right has come under assault. The tabloid press began the onslaught around the time of the Keeler-Profumo scandal, TV reporters added to the mayhem, the door-stepping paparazzi contributed their might; unofficial biographers raised the ante; then came the sting operators, the telephone hackers, the conversation tapers, the CCTV camera operators, the Twitterers, the Facebookers — and there was no looking back.
Perhaps there will come a time when technology will invent a way for thoughts to be hacked as a person thinks them. Or we will live in transparent houses. Or truth serum will be marketed as aggressively as Coca-Cola.
On Barkha Dutt’s latest episode of The Buck Stops Here, it was interesting to see the anchor, herself a victim of phone hacking, appear to argue against the right to know, a position that until now most journalists would defend.
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Kabir Bedi put it most succinctly when he said that the “right to privacy and the right for the public to know are both competing desires.”
Except that it appears to be an unfair competition: people’s desire to know has exceeded all hitherto known limits.
What does a hapless public person do except try and live his life with the assumption that someone, some day, might broadcast his most private moments?
“Behave in private as you would in public,” we were taught in Moral Science class. Over the years I have learned that there is a more grown-up word for this practice. It is “integrity”.
The past few months have shown us that some of the most celebrated and lauded individuals amongst us appear to have feet of clay: Rajat Gupta, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Kiran Bedi, not even Tehelka’s Tarun Tejpal, a supposed fighter for truth and transparency, was spared the flak.
Godmen, saints, crusaders — even M K Gandhi — appear to have had dark areas in their lives that do not stand up to public scrutiny. Any psychologist will tell you that it is the dark areas of our lives that give us our individual beauty. Our secrets are essential to our survival. Every life must possess some; in fact, to be human is to have faults.
“There is a crack in every thing — that’s how the light gets in,” sang Leonard Cohen. Perhaps that’s the only way to exist in these hyper-incriminating times: to accept the cracks, others’ as well as your own, in the knowledge that they are what make us the wonderful, complex, enigmatic and beautiful individuals we all are.
That’s why I won’t watch the Singhvi CD.
Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com