Rumour has it

One painful rumour — that’s all it takes to defeat a man for life. Rumours are powerful not because they can change the way other people view us. Rumours are powerful because they can change the way we view ourselves. When one’s dirty laundry — whether real or imagined — is being broadcast in front of the world, one suddenly feels exposed, almost as if you were walking around naked on a street full of your friends. One constantly feels the need to cover up; guilty to the world until you prove yourself innocent.

As a society, Pakistanis love to watch others fall. We don’t necessarily enjoy others stumbling but we do like to be reminded that we’re still standing in the mad race that is life in this country. There are few things more effective at helping someone fall flat on their face than a rumour that strikes at the core of their identity. Some rumours can begin with some sort of grounding in reality and truth but once they enter the public space, rumours take a life of their own. They don’t just project a different reality to your life; sometimes they also have the power to create a different reality.

There are two classic ways to react to a rumour; you can go on the attack and spread rumours of your own. In this case, there’s little to separate both sides and the zero sum race to the bottom that comes from throwing dirt only gets uglier. It’s best to avoid this race all together rather than to drag both sides to a humiliating back and forth that everyone enjoys except the two parties hurting themselves. The second way to react to a rumour is to go on the defensive and prove — to anyone who will listen — that the rumour is wrong. This is a difficult task because you’re reacting to the rumour on terms set by the rumour itself. For example, if I tell you not to think of an elephant right now, your first reaction is to think of an elephant. Similarly if I tell people not think of me as ‘x’, the first thing people think, especially in a cynical society like Pakistan, is that I am indeed ‘x’.

There is a third alternative when it comes to reacting to rumours, which is to use a rumour’s most potent strength against itself. Rumours are powerful because they reduce decades of human experience down to a few sentences of gossip or even just a single word. This isn’t just any word; this is a word that sticks to a human being for life and eventually goes on to define a person’s human experience. But if this is a rumour’s greatest strength, then this is also a rumour’s biggest weakness. No rumour — no matter how powerful — can define the full spectrum of your human experience unless you let it do so. We are so much more than the rumours that people choose to define us with. However, instead of attacking others or haplessly defending ourselves by ‘telling’ others our side of the story, we should choose to let the world experience the different dimensions of our personality firsthand and transcend rumours via the full force of our actions rather than our words. This is how you rise above rumours on your own terms instead of the terms set by the rumour.

None of this would matter in the larger context of things if Pakistan’s broader national narrative wasn’t so driven by conspiracy theories. We often lament why our beloved country is fuelled by rumours but we forget that our national conversation is the sum of our individual conversations. Rumours go viral because they make a normal person’s life appear more interesting than it actually is. Similarly, conspiracy theories make everyday incidents seem more interesting than they actually are. Rumours and conspiracy theories give us easy frameworks to understand complicated cause and effect relationships. They help us put people and events into neatly packed boxes in our minds. When society puts you in a box, as it often does in Pakistan, you need not panic. Instead of letting the box define us, we must go on to redefine the box with the full force of our presence. This is much easier said than done but it’s the only real choice we have in a society that quickly blurs the lines between rumour and reality, as it weaves both of them into our collective memory.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 5^th, 2013.

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