Recently, many controversies in this enticingly diversified nation of ours have had me thinking of our “clan” as a bunch of “hypocrites”…
Yeah, I don’t deny the same about myself, it took me something like this to happen to Shah Rukh Khan’s Billu Barber to actually write about it, hypocritical enough, if you ask me…
Distinctly etched out in my mind, are three major controversial films over the last two years, and needless to say there were a countless other issues apart from these, which aren’t as vivid in my mind anymore, but were debatable, nevertheless…I
I remember the first happened last year, when Madhuri Dixit’s comeback film, Aaja Nachle’s, title song had to be edited because a certain strain of lyric in the song was disparaging to the sentiments and cultural integrity of a certain section of our society, who by the way, I want to make no mention of, but I do remember downloading the song specifically after I heard of it, and having quite a nonplussing fifteen minutes trying to figure out which line was so offensive that they had to actually snip it off…
More recently, this year, we had a debate over whether or not the title of the film “Slumdog Millionaire”, was offensive to the slum dwelling community of our nation. Might I ask, if this film hadn’t won international acclaim, not to mention the Golden Globes, Producers’ & Actors’ Guilds, and now even the Bafta Awards(fingers crossed for the Academy!), who would have even had the time to sneak a peek of its rushes? The word “Slumdog” as perceptible as it is, has been coined from two independent words, namely “Underdog” and “Slum”. The protagonist having lived his life in a slum, and ultimately becoming an unlikely winner of a quiz show, has been referred to as a Slumdog. Quite simply, “the underdog of the slums”. We know this is true, why then do we have to take it to imply a defamation? Shouldn’t all this hype, just be called a ploy by those associations to gain attention, then?
For the third dispute, refer straight to the title of my post…
Barber is an English word, explicitly referring to a person whose vocation is to cut people’s hair. It has no altercation whatsoever to do with a caste, sect, or community of India. Yet I found it rather honourable of Shah Rukh Khan to chop off the word from the title of his latest production, just to ensure that no more controversies prevented a smooth and profitable release.
This isn’t the end of the story actually, people object to almost every single issue a movie is made on, a book is written on or any other such content that draws popularity. What I fail to gather from all this, is that the people in whose name these protests are actually made are as oblivious to these goings-on as most students are to their school-work(:P). They on the other hand, have a survival to eke out, meals to lay out on chipped plates. They have jobs to find, employments to sustain, roofs to mend, and an incessant struggle for mere existence, for one day more, one rupee more, one moment of happiness and peace, more…
Then why do these people, who have almost as much to do with being minorities as I do with being a parakeet ignite these fires, whose embers hardly ever die out, and instead pave way for much darker times, in this already tormented existence. When things get worse, it’s not these people, the so-called spokespersons for the rights of the underpriviledged who have to face the wrath of society, of violence, of hunger, and of homelessness, but it’s actually those not so few unfortunate human beings, who probably never even find out in the first place that they were being fought for, that a voice was being provided to them and to the injustice being done to them.
As diverse and multi-ethnic as my country is, if even a few per cent of our population used their right of freedom of speech and expression for the benefit of its fellow countrymen, contrary to futile, baseless, and inconsequential squabbles, I think we’d be sharing this land with much more fortunate men and women…
Unplugged 
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