By Shubhankar Verma:
In a sad move by the Censor Board yet again, a film as important as ’Aligarh’, its trailer has been given an ‘A’ certificate which means it would only be shown to audiences watching an ‘adult’ film at the cinema, or late night on T.V.
It is the need of the hour, the century, the time we’re in that we open our eyes and realise that the subject of homosexuality is anything but harmful to a younger audience, or their innocence. Homosexuality shouldn’t even be referred to as a “subject”; it’s an existence that isn’t going to just vanish by a mere ignorant pretend. There’s a lengthy list of movies (and their trailers) that could’ve been given an ‘A’ certification due to their prejudicing, discriminatory, misogynistic, misandrist, harmful cinematic content, but just because a movie happens to be a medium for the necessary telling of a story that happens to be about a man who happened to be a homosexual, it will surely corrupt naïve minds, won’t it? The only entity oozing naïvety here is the Censor Board.
We need younger audiences to view, absorb, learn about, understand, and accept the existence of varying sexual orientations and gender identities. So when a government authority, such as the Censor Board, takes away a learning opportunity from a young person, it makes the entire “world’s biggest democracy” – chant appear as a sham. Because a young person may be sitting at home, feeling different, lonely, confused because they happen to have romantic or/and sexual feelings for the same gender, but all they get to learn from such poorly made decisions by an authority who, more than frequently, seems to be misusing its power is that they’re different, deviant, a “topic” not everyone should know about.
It’s just sad.
