Trust take years to Build, Seconds to Break

“Even the gods don’t forgive those who break the Sacred oath of Bread and salt “

                        Arya Stark

These words spoken by a character of the popular TV series Game of Thrones were in the context of her brother getting murdered by a rival house while being under their roof having eaten their bread and salt. The two houses Stark and Frey had been allies for centuries but all it took was a moment to break those ties with a cascade of blood. The long held trust was broken in the most vulgar way possible.

Trust is an intangible quality , it forms the basis of majority of human interaction.  Since the time man found his feet every perspective of his interactions is based upon trust. He trusts that his parents will take care of him from infancy to adulthood, he trusts that if he renders a service he will be fairly compensated for it. In fact the switch from barter to a monetary system was based upon the common trust a currency holds. As civilization progressed the scope of trusts to be placed grew. He trusted his ruler to do the best by him and his tribe, he trusted the systems of that rule to govern him fairly and provide succor in time of need. He trusted that if he did no wrong no wrong will come to him. This trust took years to build , millenniums, but it is a fragile thing , made of gossamer , it takes only a moment to break.

What happens when it does break ? Well, for one, all our existing notions of right and wrong go out the window. We lose our moral compass. We lose something precious to us and once gone it is near impossible to regain , we become unwilling to ever trust again. All of our years of believing in someone or something is lost and all it takes is a fraction of time.

We can see such examples all around us. A businessman who built his business and his brand over 20 years , put his and others money into it , built trust into it  lost it in a span of a week when he fled the country hounded by his loan collectors. No matter the outcome of the legal proceedings, he has lost that precious commodity that still runs the wheels of business , big or small, trust.  He will find it nigh on impossible to find others to ever invest in his dreams again. Or we can take the example of a civil servant who has fulfilled his duties exemplary during the course of his long career. He has been sensitive and forthright, upstanding and decisive ,while discharging his duties. He has built the trust in him amongst the populace and the system piece by piece, painstakingly , devoting years to the cause. Then in a moment of weakness he is caught taking a bribe in a sting operation. The structure of trust collapses. Even actions which were pure are tainted, the breach of trust going back in time to undo all the good that he had done. For to be sure if the civil servant had not built his reputation over the years the backlash would not have been so great. People are hurt more when the seemingly trustworthy betray their trust rather than the ones who were never that trustworthy to start with.

Such is the power of trust. It takes years to build , seconds to break and once broken it can never easily be regained. There is always a hesitancy to bestow trust on someone who has betrayed it once and is likely to do so again given the chance. The Indian state is built upon the trust that its citizens have on its constitution. They trust that they have certain fundamental rights and trust that the state will never impinge on them and not let them be impinged upon by any other agency. India is a dream all of its citizens share and this dream would be shattered if this trust gets broken. This unfortunately happens more than it should. A pensioner who is made to run from pillar to post for his pension despite being advanced in years, a citizen who just wants the garbage taken out regularly from below his house on time but cannot do so without greasing the palms of the corrupt, the farmer whose crops failed due to the monsoons and, despite having insurance, finding out that his compensation would be nowhere near what he was promised. These incidents turn these people who used to trust their country into cynics who see its every man for himself and the disadvantaged always get more advantage taken of them. They will lose their hope in elections , in democracy and the rule of law. Theirs will be a trust the state would have to go out of its way to rebuild , a trust which it simply could have maintained if it just followed the guidelines laid down in the constitution.

“Do you trust me ?” is a refrain we often hear in movies when the protagonist asks this of his lover. The answer is invariably yes and this precedes a leap of faith that the lover needs to take to fulfill her love. The reason she says yes is the same reason we all so highly value this delicate notion of trust, we believe that it will not get broken.

Fear

It was evening of the day when i was to leave my home for the first time. I was to be away from my parents for the first time. It was not as if i had a choice , i had to leave . Staying at home had become impossible. I was at once both relieved and terrified. I had a train to catch in about 2 hrs and for that to happen i had to leave for the station right now. But before doing anything i had to pee, badly.

I didn’t switch on the light of the bathroom while entering as i thought the ambient light around would be more than enough and i would be be out in a jiffy. I peed , flushed and started to wash my hands in the sink . I felt around to find the soap but couldn’t find it. So i reached to switched on the light. It came on and i was able to find the soap. I was about to finish when i saw something move from the corner of my eye, i turned my head to the side.

It was a snake, it was a black snake , it was the biggest ,blackest snake i had ever seen and it was looking right back at me. I was frozen at the spot. I couldn’t move an inch. I didn’t know what to do. Saying that i am afraid of snakes would be an understatement . I am horrified by them, they crawl and they slime and they fork their tongues out at regular intervals. All in all a nightmarish prospect even in nightmares but this was real life and it was so much worse. It wasn’t that i had never seen snakes before, i had . But the difference had been the distance , the closet i had been to snake was around 40 m and even then i had run and hid underneath my bed. This snake on the other hand was only a few feet away and he was right beside the door. So there was no easy escape from this. I had to cross the threshold and it was protected by a monster and like in the movies the time was running out. My train was not going to wait for me and if i missed it things would be that much worse than they were already.

The snake was still looking at me , unblinkingly. It was eerily still and the only way i could tell it lived was the flickering of its tongue in and out its head.The sweat trickled down the side of my head. I had to move, i had to get out of here. I didn’t want to miss my train but i didn’t want it to bury its fangs in my ankles either. My heart thumped, the clock ticked and butterflies in my stomach were doing a dance. i heard my fathers voice calling for me to come out. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I steadied myself and … Jumped!  and …. I was out !! I was alive !!  . I quickly shut the bathroom door behind  me and ran towards my father without ever looking back to see if the snake was following me.

Honesty is the best policy

A maxim through the ages “honesty is the best policy” has been taught to their children by every responsible parents. To lie is to be devious whereas to tell the truth is a virtue. But why ? why is it that being honest is considered a good thing by  almost every culture in the world? why is it that we never hear of a society where children are taught the tricks of deceit and half truths ? Why are the tales proscribed in the textbooks of small children dedicated to Raja Harischandra but not to Natwarwal ? Is it because all human beings at their core are honest and trustworthy? But how can that be when we see the world around us with all its corruption , thievery and barefaced lies ?

An explanation may present itself in the evolutionary history of human beings. From being monkeys in trees to being monkeys in outer space we have come a long way indeed. Since the very beginning we have evolved not in isolation but as a part of a group and in order to cooperate in a group the most essential thing required is trust. If I bring water for the group from the river this week then someone else fulfill this duty the week after that i.e everyone must do their share fairly. But this often does not happen in reality, there are individuals in every group who will seek to benefit from other people’s efforts but will shirk from their own when the time comes to do their part. This poses a problem for the group in that not only does this reward people who have made no effort but that it may also inspire copycat tendencies in other members of the group. This would in the long run would destroy the entire group dynamic. As a way out of this we developed enhanced capabilities of detecting lies and deceit in others and then the liars would be ostracised from the group. This mechanism of detecting lies in others expends a significant amount of energy, energy which we would have been utilizing in other constructive endeavors such as sowing ,ploughing the fields and rearing the animals. What could we do to minimize our efforts in this regard ?

The answer presented itself in promoting honesty as a virtue (which it is). If everyone right from their childhood are brought up on the belief that it is a good thing to tell the the truth and a bad thing to lie then more likely than not they will turn out to be honest and trustworthy people. These people would be a boon to there groups and as a result of their honest cooperation the group would prosper and flourish. This is a policy designed from preventing people from lying.But no matter how good the pervasiveness of such a policy there will always be people lie and cheat. They do so because they see their individual benefits in it and do not care what happens to the group. A good example of such behavior are the industrialists who borrow huge sums of public money for their enterprise and then default and run away to other countries when the time comes to pay the money back. What should the group do about these kind of peoples ? How should they deal with such anomalies ?

Well earlier such people would be cast away from the group with the implicit belief that without the further support of the group they will perish in the wild. This was based on the assumption that there were no other groups in existence , this is of course not the case. The exiled individual can join another group and carry out his malpractices there. So then it was thought to lock these people up and the authority of the police was brought into the picture with judges to decide whether the person was indeed lying or not. Of course this could only work when the person had been apprehended. To ensure that the person could be caught wherever they fled intergovernmental treaties were signed and cooperation at a global level was called upon.

So much effort spent on a task which is essentially reparative in nature. It has got nothing to do with civilization making progress , rather it is about civilization not regressing. Hence  if leave aside the moral aspect of honesty and look at it from a pure efficiency point of view we will realize its importance. In fact it can be said that Honesty was made a virtue because we knew how efficient it is for the group. If we are all honest with each other then we can all benefit but that requires us to see the bigger picture and if we do manage that it says "Honesty is the best policy" in capital letters.

SIGH

That was the first word that escaped my lips when I heard of the news. Not Again! Yet Another! Who cares??? I don’t!! The exclamations kept flooding into my mind.

Then a shrug of the shoulders and not a thought for the next few days.

Then I saw the water cannons pummeling the students in front of the monuments built to proclaim our servility to the masters abroad now having been taken over by the masters within. I saw them go again and again towards the barricades where the batons awaited. The masters were deaf. They did not care for the screams and the shouts like they hadn’t cared for the horror that had occurred aboard that bus on the 16th of December as the anguish within turned to whimpers which turned to sweet oblivion. They didn’t care that her insides were now outside. They didn’t care that she lay naked beside the road while their instrument of law and order debated which jurisdiction was in action. It was apathy, no, it was a way of life, a way which had become the norm because rulers thought themselves accountable to void. They did not care but they pretended, that there hearts had been rendered bloodied because of this. All the appropriate things were said but then appropriateness doesn’t get the kind of “newsbite” these days like saying outrageous things. So we had a contest where each ‘statesman’ was trying to ‘inappropriate’ each other. From the son who said that the protestors were ‘dented and painted’ to the Baba who said she should have fallen to her knees and called the demons her brothers and they would have spared her. It was so wrong that it felt right. It was as if the fault was hers, that she was a woman who was there where she shouldn’t have been, that because she had an opening between her legs they had every right to put whatever they wanted in there. Again there was opprobrium, the media was up in arms, How dare they !! how dare they suggest such things to someone they had termed ‘Nirbhaya’, to someone they had put on the pedestal as the heroine for the entire womanhood of this nation, to someone they believed would inspire others to speak up and protest against what was wrong. For a moment then I had hope, hope that this time it would be different, that this time this bloody sacrifice would appease the god of inertia within us all and compel us to move.

Then she was dead.

And slowly the lullaby stopped and we awoke to find that things were much the same as they always were. Another outrage had taken place of this one and the dogs had another bone to latch onto. More than anything though the people had lost their voice because they screamed too loud and too long into a vacuum where sound doesn’t travel at all.

I too am similar, I too yearn the numbness which comes with not caring for anyone but oneself but for what it’s worth I believe nothing can or will change unless we stop treating women as second class citizens, when we stop murdering them within the wombs of their mother and when the parents stop thinking of them as some sort of burden to be got rid of. Only then perhaps we could hope for something more substantial rather than a multitude of sighs.

3 Cheers for Bankers

Bankers , they aren’t quite liked as much as teddy bears are they ? I mean If were to choose between them and Diarrhea I think most people would go for the latter. Now they aren't all bad. No seriously they aren't ! Stop laughing!

Sure they managed to screw over a lot of people out of their houses and life savings and drove a few to suicide but still lets give them a chance. I mean think of all the hard work they must have put in. The detailed analysis of all the documents they had to pore through to find the loopholes to exploit , think of the sleepless nights and the irritable mornings, the time spent away from family , the sacrifices made towards their social life ( the late show at Broadway, the wine tasting in Bordeaux) . It’s quite horrible I assure you (Youtube videos of said events look delightful). Not all of us could have taken such pains. In fact very few of us could have afforded the education it takes to get to the place where we could actually begin to take said pains (If  our transcripts were up to scratch in the first place). It’s really no mean feat to become a banker based at Wall Street , 90 % of B school grads would give their arm , eye and fingers for the opportunity.  So we have to acknowledge their hard work before we condemn them to the eternal fires of damnation. From Lehman Brothers to LIBOR it has taken very special human beings to accomplish the mighty foul ups that have occurred(But let’s not get too dark shall we , we still got cable)

Do you realize the amount of self confidence it takes to give yourself a raise after nuking (pardon the term) most of the western world’s economy ?  Neither do I !,  but I am sure it would be as much as the amount required to ask a girl out on a second date after she has just thrown her drink on your face on the first one. Bankers (sigh), I take my metaphorical hats off to you fellows , you are Darth Vader , you are the Boogie Man, you are the bump that goes off in the night, you are all our worst nightmares and the best part is we are just so darn envious that we aren’t you .

Yet.