Hail the Chief (Censor)

The country, it seems, could not be in safer hands. Our defence chiefs are busy securing not just our seas, our skies and our borders, but t...

The country, it seems, could not be in safer hands. Our defence chiefs are busy securing not just our seas, our skies and our borders, but the very boundaries of our mind, the very peripheries of our aesthetic imagination, the very limits of our cinematic experience. Rare indeed is such evidence of collective resolve. It is as if these three men had — to borrow some of Churchill’s verbal efflorescence — collectively decided to fight ’em on the beaches, fight ’em on the landing grounds, fight ’em on the fields and on the streets… fight ’em in film studios and on television screens.

In what was possibly the most significant meeting of strategic minds since Operation Parakram, they gathered at the VVIP auditorium of the Films Division in the Capital on Tuesday in full battle regalia. That it required the services of three of the most senior officers of the Indian Armed Forces — Air Chief S.P. Tyagi, Army Chief J.J. Singh and Naval Chief Arun Prakash, along with the Union Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee himself — to clear a Bollywood movie, may appear absurd to some. But in India things work differently.

Here, where we get the right to burn a book, or stone a film hall, along with our right to vote; where our politicians mutate instantly into historians and ban books for a few more votes, and policewomen turn into disapproving nannies armed with lathis, the idea of our three defence chiefs turning into film reviewers to decide whether the rest of us can handle Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s cinematic excesses in Rang De Basanti should not surprise, really.

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The System has decided in its Infinite Wisdom to infantilise the citizen. It presumes that he/she is congenitally incapable of exercising independent judgement, or distinguishing between fact and fantasy. Of course, everybody has read about air force pilots being killed in freak incidents; of course, everybody has seen kilometres of TV footage on such crashes, but if — God forbid — a film dwells on the theme, the instant assumption is that a whole generation will refuse to join the air force. If the reality is so fraught, how can the fantasy be allowed to fly?

Hollywood, incidentally, has had some famous run-ins with authority as well. The film, Coming Home, which had as its protagonist a paralysed veteran bitter over how the war had destroyed him personally, came some years after the US defeat in Vietnam. Yet, how it rankled! The Marine Corps pronounced that the film “reflected unfavourably” on its image. Yet the US administration could not ban it, nor indeed the more powerful critiques of the war — like Apocalypse Now, or The Deer Hunter — that followed shortly after. It has also on occasion taken potshots at the commander-in-chief. Wag the Dog — which has a US president calling for a fake war in order to buttress his popularity ratings before a crucial election, and which appeared to be a shadow-play of the scandal-scarred Clinton presidency — could not be swotted out of existence.

Rang De Basanti has escaped with a few snips from the collective attentions of the Indian Armed Forces. One senior air force officer even commented — after it was announced that the show could go on — “We live in a democracy, after all.” Great. Thank you, Sir. So why all the fuss in the first place?

‘Given stale food, locked up’: Truck cleaner on ‘abduction’ horror at Khedkar residence

Cities57 min ago

A truck cleaner in Navi Mumbai was rescued by the police after being abducted by the father of a sacked IAS officer. The victim was held captive, given stale food, and threatened with murder. The accused demanded compensation for their damaged car and threatened to kill the victim if not paid. The accused have been charged with extortion and destruction of evidence.

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