I heard you well Mr. Chaudhry. You are here supporting Miss T’s case. She has no country and is under house arrest. I really feel sorry for her. I could never stay like that irrespective of the magnitude of the sin I committed. I feel sorry for the Muslim fundamentalists who wanted her to be deported to Mars. I even understood by your directed speech that it could be a knee jerk or a mediated measure to salvage the Muslim votebank after the Nandigram issue. Well, I don’t blame the politicians here. It’s their job to bank on any uneasy situation that an individual creates for herself. They are only doing their job. Forget about them. What is your definition of creative freedom? Is it some arth derived from a Yankee institution or a home-brewed phrase of your IIPM? Well, what ever it is… Let me get across my point of view.
I am not a Muslim. I have not read her book. I was not even in India when this entire drama unfolded on the newspapers and my 21-inch Thomson color television. I did not even have the urge to get up and type “Taslima and West Bengal” in Google, to educate myself on the issue. You can call me a political-illiterate, by all means. You may call me heartless not to feel of Miss T. Yes, my heart works on a pacemaker. Even now, when the TV shows any news on her, I change the channel, consciously. I do the same for Mr. Raj and Mr. Laloo. Of course you know whom I am referring to. These are famous personalities of this year. Mr. Raj stirred up violence in Maharasthra and Mr. Laloo in Karnataka?
India being a secular country does not have any state religion. But a state derives its power from the people. Without it, a state is nothing. Hope you agree to this. Nevertheless, I continue.
People worship a particular deity. Each God belongs to only one religion. We don’t have a multi-religious almighty as yet! Politicians do a balancing act by tying a rope to the emotions of the hoi polloi and themselves. Well, you know how effervescent emotions are. Now these emotions are tied to God and His respective religion. So, when an intelligent writer exercises his creative freedom by writing something like Miss T or Mr. Rushdie, he pulls the fine strings between a persons emotions and the part of the brain that controls violent activities. Our politicians sight this slight movement and all hell breaks loose. Which eventually leads to the loss of public property. Whose money is this? My money. Your money.
Let me dwell a paragraph or 2 on Mr. Raj and Mr. Laloo. Mr Raj must compensate all the monetary loss from to the destruction to public property. Why?? He pulled the string. Which string? Remember the one connecting a persons emotions and the part of the brain that unleashes the monster within! And Mr. Laloo, who, I heard made Indian railways a success story, said ‘dirty people’. Did you ask, “To whom?” Well, I don’t know. It was said in Karnataka. He couldn’t be referring to the Maharastrians or the North Indians or the Bengalis. This also led to Kannadigas vandalizing the railway offices and the like. Again, paisa gaya.
So, what is the moral of the story? Liberty be it, speech (Laloo or Raj, oops I missed the Mr. for both) or literary (Miss T) or cinema (Mr. Shahrukh and smoking) is not absolute. There are millions of topics to chose from, when you write a novel. There are tens of ways to phrase a particular question in (I am referring to the question which was deleted from the Miss T’s book). If Mr. Railway minister said, “dirty people”, he should have atleast mentioned the object. Jesus! People must have even fought debating about the object here. If Mr. Raj, thinks that North Indians are creating a job scarcity or violent atmosphere, there are a many ways to stabilize the violent volatility.
Just like movies instigate violence by their content, books do too. On screen, Mr. Shahrukh looks good smoking, then it is my duty to tell my son that my son needs to have a look at Shahrukh’s liver too. I am conscious enough to segregate right from wrong, frills from value. Not everyone is. When I read the “deleted and controversial line” from Miss T’s book, I may not buy the line. I know what to absorb from the book. Not many know it. When Mr. Raj said what he did, I wont ask my Maharashtrian son to beat up my newspaperwalla. I am aware of the constitutional rights in Part III of our constitution. Well, I love my Punjabi neighbor. So, people are not receptive enough to appreciate any kind of creative freedom that takes a tangential route.
So for heaven’s sake I beseech you, the league of “creative” actors, politicians and writers, to hold on to your creativity and out of the box ideas. I do not want such nondescript controversies to plague this country. Let us talk about growth and betterment and the contructive masala alike. No not Jodha Akbar! I am not sure if Jodha is indeed Akbar’s wife. I should make my son repeat the disclaimer of this movie a million times.
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