PEOPLE REMEMBER actors, singers, writers, directors and sports stars through their best works, even when such works are very few. Some artists are celebrated for a single work; for instance the status of V.V.S. Laxman as a sports legend rests on a single Test inning. The glory of major public figures comes from their finest moments, not their worst. Even intellectuals evaluate other intellectuals through their best work, while ignoring all the bad stuff. There is something correct, sensible and generous about this. And it would appear that this is how one must evaluate those who play a role, or will play a role, in our personal or professional lives. We should think the best of a person, consider all that is great about the person and ignore what is rotten. In fact, this is how most people think about family and friends. And this is also the very source of all their miseries.
In evaluating a person who is or would be family, friend or collaborator, one has to consider the worst qualities as the defining characteristics of that person. This may seem like an abstraction, until it leads to a violent tragedy, as in the case of the death of a young woman in Noida a few days ago from severe burns. We do not know yet whether she was set ablaze by someone in her home or if she killed herself. There is no doubt, though, that she was tormented.
She faced a classic problem that many young women in India face, where their in-laws and husbands make many material demands and the bridal side yields to them, assuming that things will get better. But the harassment continues. In this specific case, the husband also appeared to be uncomfortable with his wife’s desire to run a beauty parlour and her social media fame.
As familiar as all this is, so is the fact that the girl left her husband and went back to her parents more than once. But the husband always persuaded her back. Indians attribute this act of going back to a home filled with people who are capable of cruelty to the compulsion many women feel to stay in a marriage. There might be some truth in that, but not so much that we should frame it that way. The act of returning to cruel people usually emerges from the hope that such people may change.
People who have some evil inside them are often quite persuasive and charming, perhaps because compared to their worst qualities, their ordinary niceness seems like a spectacular virtue.
But they usually don’t change. A person who is capable of cruelty—whether a simple form of cruelty, like in this case, or a more sophisticated kind that involves manipulation and making things unpleasant to teach someone a lesson—has been this way for long and wishes to be so.
I mentioned the case of the young Noida woman’s death because the dramatic impact of the phenomenon is evident only in violent death. Otherwise, it would appear odd that I am asking you to think the worst of people and not give them a long rope for the sake of an abstract argument.
But what most victims endure is something just short of death. Most cruel people are not murderers. The most prevalent and dangerous form of evil is a certain ordinary evil that exists in many people who are also excellent at apologizing.
The boy who hits his girlfriend and is remorseful will do it again, expressions of remorse included. The cruel parent will endure. The punishing spouse will find moral reasons to continue.
Most cruel people do not do anything extreme or criminal. That is how they survive. They get that long rope because people are under the assumption that we must think the best of people and not the worst.
I like the modern expression ‘red flag.’ It is usually used in retrospect as something that you should have seen but overlooked. A ‘red flag’ contains within it the idea that a single incident is a window to a person, or of dark things to come. It suggests that incidents never exist in isolation. But the most interesting thing about the term is that people invoke it only when it is too late. This is because of hope, which again is among our most celebrated qualities.
I am a fan of hope, and a lot of good can come of it. But in some aspects, like in the evaluation of a person who matters, hope is a form of sadness, just another way of speaking to oneself. But should a single act of cruelty be so unforgivable? Can’t people become better people?
Cruelty has advantages. People who can act on their cruel ideas have enjoyed its effects for too long to change. Also, the idea that people reform because of the force of goodness is the propaganda of those in the industry of reformation.
Cruel people do become less cruel or even completely benign, but only once they lose power—for instance, when they age. That is why the world is filled with sweet old people.
People judge their own lives by how they end. In their professional estimation, especially, they are oddly harsh on themselves. They evaluate themselves by what they have failed to achieve, especially successful people as they struggle to move on to the next rung. As a journalist, I haven’t met a public figure who did not have a sense of failure, except Sachin Tendulkar, although that’s only because I met him when he was at his peak. But they are more generous to others, seeing only what is best. They extend this long rope in their personal life too, willing to see failings as temporary.
But, maybe people should err in favour of caution and not the sadness of hope.
 (My latest book is out: ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’)