Shweta, your mic is on

Illustration/Uday Mohite

"Shweta, your mic is on" a dozen (of 111) classmates beseeched a now famous young woman called Shweta, unaware her Zoom mic was on, while she gossiped with a friend about her friend Pandit and his "sex-addicted" girlfriend and details he had shared about their sex life. The clip which went viral, was like a cabaret sequence in an old Bollywood movie. The risqué song and dance provided by Shweta, talking to her friend with the lip-smacking abandon of one who has bonafide juicy gossip, oblivious to impending danger (a screen recording villain!). The desperation of cringing classmates crying "Shweta, your mic is on", like Nirupa Roy in the kidnapper's snare, trying to warn her son. And, as movies ended with "kanoon ke haath bahut lambe hain", yaniki the police arriving too late, here the teacher suddenly appeared with "sorry I had got disconnected for some time, did you all see the PPT?"

The clip is also a story within a story within a story about privacy. To record and release the clip without her consent violated Shweta's digital privacy. Shweta betrayed Pandit's confidences. But, hadn't Pandit betrayed his girlfriend, by sharing their sex life, with Shweta?

Who can cast the first stone here? "Don't tell anyone but..." we have all begun many a forbidden conversation. But, what if you are a part of that story you're telling - like two broken-up lovers or fighting friends do? Who owns the experience, not so much joint as entangled? This question raises some important ideas about privacy. To an extent we all expect and dread that details of our relationships, will be narrated to others, not always showing us in a good light. But, we also hope the stories will be told in a way that won't strip us of our wholeness, another word for our humanity - that they will be presented in a context, not as disembodied bits for others to feed on.

We can see privacy in legal terms, linked to the fragmented idea of property - as owning our data or expressions - but also, as a whole private self, we share partially, with different people in different contexts. The question becomes not only how it is revealed, but how it is received. All intimacies, are fraught with the potential for exposure and violence. Do we minimise or maximise this violence? This is a question of ethics and so, has black and white and grey areas.

Shweta's gossip is a routine grey area. But it implicates her, as she reveals herself to her friend in gossiping. Her classmates' anxiety is ethical, for they recognise her intended privacy - she does not intend to share this part of herself, or even Pandit's story with all of them. Except the classmates who put the video out and made it viral.

Shweta your mic is on could be said to each of us today - someone is always listening. Alexa, Facebook, the government, Yashraj Mukhate. Increasingly, the Internet makes it easy to see each other as fragments - a tweet, 20 seconds of video - and to remix this fragmentation removed from its intentions and context - in ways playful, unkind, or, in political matters, sinister. In a time when the self becomes fodder for social media feeds, the discussion on privacy needs to include ethical questions of respect - how we see others as much as what we see of others.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com