Was the Bihar cheating photo a fake? Why this Swiss poet thought so

It was an informal chat, rather quite late on Friday night, at a cafe in central Delhi when I asked Heike Fiedler, a Swiss author and poet, what she thought of the now infamous "Bihar cheating" photo. Her answer couldn't have been more surprising. Heike, who is based in Geneva, is familiar with India because she has made several trips to the country's cities. Currently in Delhi, she is spending her last week of a three-month residency in India. On Friday, she performed - her poems are more than words as they include sounds and imagery - at an event hosted by Institut Français en Inde, aka French Cultural Centre in Delhi. Considering she was soon going back, with an entitlement that comes with journalistic curiosity, I asked her about the idea of India when I brought in the Bihar photo into the picture.

To my surprise, Heike said that she had seen the picture on her phone. I knew the picture had gone viral on social media and been published by a fair number of news sites and publications, but wasn't entirely sure that Heike, who would have been fairly preoccupied with her work, would have noticed it. After all, artists and serious writers don't actually monitor content going viral on the web.

But Heike had seen it. So I asked her what she thought of it. "It is an interesting photo. But I think it is fake," she said. It was a sort of performance, where the people hanging from windows were actually actors enacting a scene - that was her opinion.

This is interesting at so many levels. It also shows how remarkable the photograph is. It captures India in its most basic, raw and real form. The fact that it is common - one of my colleagues Hussain Rahmani shared his own experience of taking the board exam in Bihar and I too can confirm that in my village in Agra, cheating used to be fairly a regular sight when I was there around 20 years ago - only shows that this is not just an image. It is an idea, which for better or for worse, reveals something more profound about the Indian society.

The reason why Heike thought the photograph was fake while we readily accepted it is not because she has not seen how people cheat in Indian schools. It is because the idea of such brazen cheating for her - as well as for most others across the world - is no longer a concept that is readily acceptable. But in India we have no qualms about it.

Even more incredulous for Heike was the presence of parents and relatives in that photo. When I asked her why she thought it was fake, she said, "Of course, it is fake. How can parents help their kids cheat in exams like this?"

The differences are so apparent. The whole moral and ethical fabric of the Indian society is starkly different from the one that people outside are familiar with. Yes, there is cheating everywhere. Or corruption. Or people playing loose and fast with ethics. But nowhere is it as brazen and widely-accepted as part of the daily life as it is in India.

For foreigner visitors like Heike, it is inconceivable that parents and other family members can help kids cheat and, in turn, pass on to them the idea that cheating is not only okay but is also an acceptable tool to be used when the going gets tough.

But not in India. Here, we see parents and relatives doing a lot more than helping their kids with cheating during an exam. And it is not something that is limited to people who are poor and want to use cheating as a way to get out of material misery. We see businesspersons in India teaching their kids how to cheat people so that their million dollar enterprises can grow into a multi-million dollar empire. We see politicians teaching their children how to outsmart their opponents by hook or crook, ethics be damned.

This is also the reason why we see criminals in India always getting support from their friends or families, irrespective of their crime. Or even statements like, "Ladke, ladke hain. Galti ho jati hai."

There is a unique Indianness to a number of little things we do, and we learn this from people who should know better than to teach us these things. We cheat and lie all the time, and take advantage of every situation because cheating-to-win as an idea is deeply ingrained in the Indian society.

The "Bihar cheating" photo is not just about a half-built school and a number of parents helping their kids cheat. You can enter the boardroom of a family-run business in India and find exactly what you saw in the photograph.

It captures the real India. And it is not a very pretty picture.