By Hari Menon:
“A PIL (Public Interest Litigation) was filed on Monday in the Allahabad High Court seeking a ban on the showcasing of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s film ‘Ram Leela’ on grounds that it “deliberately and maliciously insults and outrages the religious sentiments of Hindus.”-The Hindu
A line pulled straight out of a news article shouldn’t have been blatantly used, but the emotions it evoked were hard to keep aside.
By the way, this whole concept of banning really sucks. Are we all contestants of Big Brother/Boss? “Why does it suck?” we ask. What are we? Sheep? A bunch of fellows go and decide for themselves that something is not good for a community, especially by evoking one’s sentiment to religion. What an old trick! The lines of the article which sounded rather fanatic in their outlook, specially this one, “The film’s posters show half-nude characters in a rather offensive and compromising situations and use the tag ‘Goliyon ki Raas Leela’ to define itself. The official trailer of the film shows abusive language and intimate scenes which are far away from the religious connotations of this word, which insults and offends the religious sentiments of Hindus.” It almost sounds like the person has never seen anyone nude in life.
“Intimate scenes”, “Compromising situations”, what? Surely! All Hindus will have a problem watching this movie. Again, let’s repeat! All Hindus! Hilarious! And delirious too. So what do we go ahead and do? We should not shy away from doing everything in our might to prevent everyone from seeing what is there on offer if it offends someone’s sense of self-righteousness or not. Everyone wants to be the thunderous voice in the house. Just that no one wants to say things aloud. Instead of saying ‘Sexually evocative poses’, they say “Compromising situations“, because? Because anything remotely sounding like ‘Sex’ is to be muted in public. Pretty surely, folks with such mentality would blush a bit too often, even in their Mathematics class, to the extent that they have troubles reading every equation containing the word Sec2β!
How convenient it is to fiddle with the concept of free will by banning something, be it a work of art or be it anything in the apparent public interest. This can’t happen forever. It is sad to see so many works go unappreciated for the sole reason that they put us a bit outside the comfort zone of our mental confines. Even sadder is the fact that the list of such works isn’t short by any means.
Where are the worshipers of free-will? We’ve already lost a lot of good work to the ‘banners‘. How much more?
To give an idea of what the status quo has been so far, here’s a list of things that were lost to us: List of films which have been banned:
And then there are books, of course