Trust: a rant

I went to a dermatologist in one of the most prestigious hospitals of the city. I had a skin infection. The quite-famous doctor explained what it was. Whilst she was prescribing, I specifically told her that I had severe allergies to a number of skin medicines - azoles, norfloxacin and terbinafine.

She said "oh" and then added that that precludes almost all oral medicines, so she would only prescribe skin ointments. Which she did. Two of them.

I applied one before going to bed.

And hallelujah, I woke up early morning, scratching myself prodigiously. In the mirror I found myself to be a crimson eruption of allergic scabs. The ointment given had precisely the ingredients which I had an allergy to.

Tanu gave me an Allegra. And my mum said "Before applying the ointments, you should have checked their composition."

I said "I had told her my allergies. Should I not trust a professional to do her job, without continually double-checking what she prescribes?"

And that got me thinking. Of one of the most dismaying aspects of our society - one which this particular lady doctor personified - the inability to be trustworthy.

And the crisis was not personal, but afflicted our homes, society, alas, the world at large.

In the early days of employment, when I was earning a pittance, a friend and I put some meagre savings together and started investing in the share market. We used to work out the strategy and he used to invest. It was not digital those days, and it was bit of a labyrinth of brokers, paperwork and deal-making, which my friend did well. He used to do the transactions in his name and we used to share the spoils.

There was some money we earned and he used to hand me envelopes of cash. He kept the calculations, the papers, and merely shared my part of the gains. Till, perchance, I stumbled upon the trading slips - and discovered he had skimmed me royally.

He was a friend. We used to hang together, joshed with each other's family members, were studying to be CAs together. What hurt was not the fact that there was money lost, but there was an irreparable breach which had happened. I would now always double check everything we did together, which was, for me, an unthinkable thing.

The real betrayal, then, was not the lie. It was the moment he knew the truth, but still let me walk blind into it.

When I think about how trust makes the world run, it is fairly mind-boggling. We trust the pilots of the aircraft we are travelling in to know how to fly a plane, the engineers who looked at it before it flew to have done a thorough job. We rely on banks to keep our money safe. We cross roads when the lights turn green for walking. We do things based on commitments of what will be done in turn. Our civilization, in fact, is based on unsigned pledges, promises made, commitments kept.

We are shooting in the dark, taking leaps into the darkness, at every juncture of our lives - on the basis of the trust that we will be caught safely. And if that system starts to break, then we are moving towards chaos.

How much can one person keep looking back, or double-check everything at every juncture?

A colleague told me about his recommendation for a promotion of an extremely talented subordinate. He spoke to his HR Head, who confirmed he would do the needful with the CEO. Come the day, and the HR Head came back and said that the CEO had refused the promotion. As it happened, this colleague had a one-to-one with the CEO, and decided to ask him the reason for refusing the promotion. The CEO looked at him, baffled, and informed my colleague that it was the HR Head who had said that this promotion need not be given.

His travails with HR (which to my mind is the most untrustworthy department in any company) were, of course, symptomatic of how companies, which don't build a strong moral fibre, disintegrate.

Is it that people are punting for short-term gains for themselves, jettisoning the possibility of long-term relationships and bonds? Is trust then merely a hook to hang expediency? How will this span out in the coming days, years? Will we become forever suspicious of each other, and look behind our shoulders for everything? How, in the name of heavens, will we survive?

Because, in matters of trust, negligence is betrayal. Professionals don't just deliver; they stand guard at the gate of trust. When people stop doing the hard work of thinking carefully, they start betraying silently. So then, it's not the lack of knowledge, but the absence of care, that cracks the foundations of trust.

I still remember a story from my school days, where a traveller in a desert had stopped to help a man lying on the side of the road, croaking for water. And as soon as the traveller stopped, the man had jumped and asked him to hand over his purse. The traveller did so, but told the thief "Please take whatever you want, but please don't boast about what you did. Else people will lose trust - and cease stopping for people who genuinely require help."

Then, trust is really a whole structure of being. Every time we let our word drift into oblivion and devolve into non-adherence, we just don't damage credibility. We willy-nilly damage the invisible contract we all live by.

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Some poems to think about the stickier parts of life!

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