Deep Throat

To him, the Censor Board is the ultimate windmill, to charge heroically on his bony horse, and tattered lance cheered on by a trusty assistant Sancho Panza, or Gulab Banoo, orChampa Rani! One hint of a cut, change or blip is like an assault on his long suffering body, mind, and other extremities. Screaming, biting, kicking, he drags himself to public forums and revels in his new-found martyrdom and proceeds to bleed and die like a long drawn-out spaghetti western. Mama Mia! Bring on de ketchup! May be it will bring in da audience!

Then again, why Censorship at all? Why not let a long-suffering, politically savvy, heavily taken for granted public decide for themselves what they want to watch or not. After all, they are paying for it with extremely hard-earned money. The funny part of it is, that Censorship is actually a farce. The rules that govern this august body make them nothing more than than the Protector of everything venal, slimy, corrupt, exploitative, ie, the government and its evil manifestations. The Censor rules that you cannot show corrupt politicians, policemen, and civil servants. You cannot show religious bigotry, or political chicanery. So what is the CensorBoard for? To protect a system that it more wrong than right, to suffer a lie, to pretend that all these things don8217;t exist. Come on!

Your voting public are not arseholes! By censoring movies, you can8217;t prevent the truth from permeating a social fabric and as a matter of fact exaggerate and distort it further by censoring. The problem with righteousness is that ordinary people can perpetuate the most horrific crimes on humanity in the name of God or good because they actually believe it is for the good of the majority. Look at what Stalin, Hitler, Mrs G and the emergency, the inquisition, the Khmer rouge did. Removing Mrs Gandhi8217;s name from the Nagarwala case in a film did not mean that people didn8217;t know she was involved and even if they did see the film, did anyone care? Our politicians actually believe that their public reveres them and will preserve their public image forever. Bullshit! Everyone in the country knows exactly who is worth what and votes either because of a lack of better choice or amisplaced idea that he has a vested interest in a party or person. Given half a chance, most people would lynch politicians.

So our Censor Board upholds the moral fabric of this country and they in their wisdom and righteousness decide what is morally right or wrong for our untutored, seething, sweating, shat-upon millions.

I wish the Censor Board could be put through a small course in history of human suffering and exploitation that they indirectly support. I believe that if an injustice or a lie is cynically perpetuated, then it does only a limited amount of damage because people actually see through it, but if the truth is distorted by a Malevolent Righteousness, then it perpetuates crimes and suffering far greater than the cause of that belief, as well as state-controlled fascism and bigotry of the worst kind on its own peoples. My encounters with the Censor Board have been ridiculously funny in retrospect because I only make commissioned ad-films and not earth-shattering works of art. I remember manyyears ago, making a film for Bombay Dyeing full of sexual innuendo and subliminal violence that left the Censor Board more than a bit worried. But since nothing was explicit, they were a bit foxed as to what to delete. So the comment came back that it was more like a Hindi movie than an ad-film and we should water down its masala! Knowing full well what they were talking about, but pretending ignorance, I asked for specifics and got lots of evasion. I finally made some cosmetic changes and the film was passed. Censorship with DoorDarshan can be nightmarish, they have no appointed board, the authority is some nose-picking clerk-type babu and there is no reviewing committee.

The censorship in government-run TV is completely arbitrary and at the whims and fancies of the Powers That Be. The Most Powerful being a nose-picking clerk, than the Deputy Director General, then the Director General of DD and the last and the least, the Minister of Iamp;B. The last time a minister actually raved and ranted about thefalling necklines and rising skirts and the GENERAL MORAL DECAY in the corridors of Mandi House was Sushma Swaraj. She swept through everything armed with Moral Righteousness. Heads rolled, pockets were turned out, and blouses went from ears to wrist and became long as shirts to be tucked into saris to hide hirsute navels. And the peripheral damage went on to skirts they are not Hindu nari-like and Nirodh. Chaste Indians do not fornicate out of wedlock and social sanction so why the condom, and lo and behold, the lowly Mala D? Because some neighbour8217;s precocious five year-old daughter thought it was a toffee and insisted on having it, now! Mandi House has still not recovered from that and everybody quakes at the mention of Her Name including the newsreaders.

Burkhas anyone?

One very interesting episode while on the power of Mandi House was when one South Indian gentleman decided that Juliet in Romeo and Juliet was an historical name and not a fictional one and asked me to make it Romeo and Julie! Iargued myself hoarse, but he was adamant and finally said that if I was so sure that the author was Shakespeare, then, Pliss to get the concerned Gents written permission!8217; I finally had to go to Bhasker Ghosh, the director general, who laughed uproariously and thought I was joking.

The most telling episode was when I received a letter stating that a section of a film where a patient covered in plaster cannot be dropped so cruelly and heartlessly by stretcher bearers in the middle of a road at the approach of a runaway suitcase as it is against the rules and training of the stretcher bearers and they might object! Never mind the patient who gets up and runs away himself! I argued, the babu shook his legs and head vigorously saying, Cannot!8217; I told him, It8217;s a joke.8217; He tried to tell me another joke just to be equal. I threatened to go to a higher authority at which stage he thundered, shaking his legs vigorously, I am the highest authority!8217; I finally lost it and threatened him saying, It will cost meand the country Rs 25,000 worth of foreign exchange to reshoot this and that I would add Rs 5,000 more from my pocket to see that someone breaks his legs on a dark, stormy night.8217; He went apocalyptic, and threatened to have me harmed, blacklisted, bodily removed etc. I told him calmly that I would tell his boss that he had asked me for a bribe. He was horrified. But I did not,8217; says he. I said, I know that, you know that, but nobody else knows and nobody else will believe you.8217; He looked mortified, thought about it, and agreed. He passed the commercial. So like the Minister of Health said eight years ago, and self-righteously proclaimed to the WHO, We are not afraid of AIDS. We are Indians. We are protected by our culture.8217; RIP

Prahlad Kakkar is an ad-film maker