Opinion Indecorous, indecent
FTII’s trumpery affidavit is an insult to the idea of freedom on campus.
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As insurance against protests which had become a prominent feature of campus life at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), students must file an affidavit promising not to violate “decorum and decency on campus”. They must not insult faculty and staff and, in a weird nod to Sanskritic culture, their elders.
Executed on a Rs 100 stamp paper, this is a quick and dirty substitute for quality academic leadership and an atmosphere of trust and creative freedom which the campus patently lacks.
These clauses raise interesting questions about the mind which dreamed them up. Does the FTII chairman, Gajendra Chauhan, whose claim to fame rests on his role in Mahabharata, believe that decorum and decency are ideas that have remained unchanged since the epic period? What constitutes insult, and which elders are so vulnerable to it that they must seek legal protection? With a bit of imagination, almost every human act except maintaining the basal metabolic rate can be read as an insult.
Portions of this affidavit are utterly preposterous and so open to whimsical interpretation that it is is bound to be thrown out by the courts. Nevertheless, it will suffice the purpose, because the fear of being taken to court in the first place, an expensive and often unnerving process, will enforce conformity. Is conformity on the campus of India’s most respected teaching institution in cinema and television in the national interest? Is it in anyone’s interest, except the battle-weary and wrong-footed chairman’s? It is indecent and indecorous of the institution to try to use the law as a bludgeon to browbeat the student body. Cinema is an innately experimental medium and conformism is its natural enemy. Rather than trying to insure the campus with a Rs 100 stamp paper, the FTII needs capable academic leadership which students respect and trust.
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