Right from our childhood we are taught not to pay heed to rumors. Not to spread them. And being innocent victims of a warped sense of fair play, we nod our heads and agree.

But if life has been kind enough to serve you a second helping, you change your mind pretty soon. And conclude for instance that the street is a better place to search for the truth than the haloed precincts of a temple or a court.

Because the street my friends, is an amazing court. It believes in justice...not law.

It wants no evidence. Seeks no proof. It just consolidates raw wisdom and street savvy into a simple dispensation of justice. It doesn’t punish but just condemns. And sometimes that is more painful.

So for instance it doesn’t just allege that ‘so and so’ is a crook, that ‘so and so’ is corrupt, that ‘so and so’ is a bastard and so on. It just comes right up to your face and tells you, with all the collective strength of conviction that ‘this’ is what it believes…’this’ is the verdict…and ‘THIS’ is the fact!!!

In a country (and within the framework of a system) where it is so easy to slip behind a loophole called law…where people are ‘suspected’ of being a rapist (and no one looks at the scratches on his face and the smirk on his dick), where people are ‘supposed’ to be corrupt (and no one questions how a guy who couldn’t pay his car EMIs just a few years back is now starting a car manufacturing factory), where people are ‘revered’ when they disown family and friends the moment there is talk that power is being grossly misused…In a country such as this, in a society such as this…I find it more sensible to trust the word on the street.

‘So and so’ is a bastard…don’t trust him. ‘So and so’ is a crook…he’ll steal you blind…when the street advises you thus, please listen. I have learnt to.

And now I don’t wait for a few years to decide that a Chief Minister’s son was a conduit of corruption. I don’t give a proven murderer of secularism a second look. For me, the street has spoken and I am convinced. And if the street deems fit to punish the culprit, so be it. I think we were better off in those days when mobs had fury,and being lynched was a 2 minute noodle that hung you by the neck.

Of course the street has a drawback. It has two sides. For example the same street that 'knows' that the Juggernaut is as guilty as hell, might decide that perhaps the disgraced IT Czar may not be the cheat or villain that he is made out to be.

I am by no means launching a campaign to try and convince you that street-talk is the new age gospel. but yes, I am asking you to take a closer, harder look at the hypocrisy that we have grown in our back yard gardens.

Thirty years after a generation of Sikhs were wiped out, the perpetrator of the crime is declared ‘not guilty’. Just a few days after counting the ill gotten wealth a gentleman has accumulated in the few years that his father was in power, there are still people who think he will come out squeaky clean.

You all have met someone like this. You have heard the unsavory side of a personality. That he is a wife beater. That he has a Mistress. That he is a whore monger. That he is a drunkard. But most of you tend to be lenient and say that you’ll believe it when there is proof.

And that is the comfort zone you need to step out of. Proof is a percentage term in the bottle of spirit that you enjoy. That’s it. Do not give it a bigger role than that in your life.

That will be the worst miscasting disaster that can ever happen. Remember, a few thousand years after we wove stories about the Varaha Avataara (about the boar that saved ‘the globe’ by picking it up with its nose) Galileo was still being asked to provide proof that the earth was indeed a sphere.