Almost the entire district court staff boycotted me since the day our newspaper carried a report on a former court employee being booked for the offence of helping in misplacing a case file from the court record. Wherever I went employees received me with dispassionate remarks about why it was so very essential for me to run that story. And that I could well have ignored it. My beat had never been as tough as it was now getting to be. There were strong strains of tension all around and I knew this was the price one had to pay for laying norms for oneself and abiding by them.I would not have run into the court staff, had it not been mandatory for me to check an order from the court record. They knew how essential it was for me to cross-check and that was the sole reason why they were throwing their weight around. So much so that one day a court employee encountered me to say: "You should never write against people you have to deal with daily. Your colleague from the other paper was smart enough to have known about the case and not write about it. You have invited trouble for yourself."Another vouched for the honesty of the man who was booked in the missing file case and said he was being implicated falsely. "How did you know he was guilty?" he shouted. I countered him by saying I did not know whether he was or not. But I knew that I had reported cases where a poor man from remote villages had been caught for gambling and had been convicted and fined; how I had written about those who were actually sentenced to imprisonments for petty crimes. And so, in all fairness, one had to write about this man too.I told him that in each of the cases where a person was convicted, no one was never too sure about the `guilt' of the guilty. He was not too sure of this when he was typing the conviction order. Similarly I was not too sure when I was reporting it.But we all do our duty. We report cases because they fall within the area of norms we have outlined for ourselves. He types orders because he is obliged to. The moment a case gets registered in the police files, it becomes a matter of public importance and we, as journalists, are duty-bound to write about it not because we get some sort of pleasure by undermining the prestige of people but because we are supposed to deter society from repeating crimes already committed.The broth was being spoilt but there was no other way out. I believed they would all come around when they realised what I did was the call of duty and nothing else. For some days to come, I did not visit some of these courts. I prepared myself to miss a story or two. There were some very tough situations when the isolation got to me - with no one talking to me and no one caring to respond to my greetings. I bore it all in the hope that the routine would normalise. It was bound to.And then one day when I was sitting with a lawyer, I heard an employee call out for me: "There is a very important judgment in my court. Do come over and take down the details." I was surprised but not very much. I knew the strategy I had adopted was the best. Indifference alone could counter indifference just as diamond alone cuts diamond.Gradually, everyone began responding in the old familiar way. Days of discord had passed away as if they had never come. My hope was reaffirmed once again. I knew there was never a solution better than "believing in oneself."
