Over 2.7 lakh Indians are registered on Ashley Madison, the website that caters specifically to those seeking relationships outside marriage. They are also victims of a diabolical attack by hackers who are threatening to expose them. In an ominous message, bound to unleash terror among the 37 million users of the site, the perpetrators of this tardy viciousness have stated: “We will release customer records, profiles, nude photographs and credit card transactions if the site is not shut down permanently.” A writer I’d read somewhere had predicted that in the future, wars need not be fought with fancy artillery or bombs. All you need to do is make every e-mail and SMS ever exchanged, public, for the third world war to begin. Not a single relationship anywhere would survive, between friends or family, colleagues, countries, and most certainly not, spouses. Ashley Madison is one of those brilliantly subversive ideas, if grimly hilarious. It ruthlessly pokes fun at the huge gap between the way we live and the absurdities of our desires. The fact that it’s a billion-dollar company, based entirely on human frailty and cynical audaciousness has enraged the hackers, who have taken the moral high ground to destroy a “business built on broken hearts, ruined marriages and damaged families”. The data on India paints my fellow countrymen in a very different light. I might add, a far more colourful one than previously thought. Ashley Madison had a quiet launch in India in January 2014. Despite zero marketing, the website revealed it received over 100,000 unique page views and 50,300 members in 48 hours. Women represent more than half of the sign ups with an inordinately large percentage of them hailing from Gurgaon. Who would have imagined that in an ostensibly traditional, marriage-obsessed society, a service on the fringes of social norms would generate so much interest? Indians are inherently fatalistic, and like to be prepared for the worst. That’s why 80 per cent of online transactions are on the cash-on-delivery model because we’re too suspicious to pay for something before seeing it. Yet, they have willingly thrown caution to the winds by registering online for illicit encounters, undoubtedly aware that a digital footprint is impossible to erase. Infidelity is hardly new — a 1,000-year-old narrative that links our past to our present. Shakespeare would never have been able to write Macbeth or Hamlet if he’d been surrounded by faithful, happily married people. Literature has always held true romance to be the unattainable. Through the centuries, adventure and secret getaways are the temporary solutions to the problem of feeling out of kilter. Now, life can be elsewhere at the click of a button. Earlier, adulterous heroines like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary committed suicide because of the conflict between social pressure and individual happiness. In Sibling Rivalry, a Kirstie Alley film that’s always playing on MGM these days, her lover dies one lusty afternoon. It doesn’t end her marriage. In an age of multiple nuptials and divorce, sites like Ashley Madison will eventually get grudging, mainstream acceptance but till then their tagline really should be : Life is short. Cover your tracks. hutkayfilms@gmail.com
