I don’t understand the obsession with moral policing in this country. We love to portray ourselves as the custodian of our long forgotten tradition and heritage. The heights of such a utopian thought was the shredding and postponement and final cancellation of the screening of the Dirty Picture...all for what? for preserving the Indian tradition amongst our youth…I do not deny that this is no children’s’ movie by any stretch of imagination but there have been many more of skin-flashing, ‘tabooed’ movies doing the rounds in our living rooms in the past and present….and if anything our tech-savvy new generation is not restrained by the holds of a TV remote and there is a whole new web world – uncensored and waiting to be explored……………..I am by no means propagating obscenity and vulgarity as wholesome entertainment for our tiny tots but what I am also not able to fathom is the hypocrisy of these self-proclaimed morality goons.
One round of channel surfing and flip flopping between shows will tell us the range of our entertainment radius and I would love to explore and figure out the worth and contribution of these myriad of shows in leading our youth on the so called righteous path …it starts from one side with the glycerine coated ‘saas-bahu’ serials which I cannot credit with any essence or subject worth watching or learning…..it slightly modifies itself into equally dramatic and tear ridden reality shows….where I see less talent and more drama as the shows move into seasons in leaps and bounds…and where you are not sure of what talent you possess, you may choose to watch the great Indian ragging show..or Roadies in other words…it’s definitely a quick round up on the latest cuss and swear words and all other things ‘yo’..! And the last on that surfing list has to be the Splitsvilla..I cannot but wonder how many morality goons would love their kids grow up watching this scandalous show..
And if we discount these shows and take a slight diversion from these shows into the Bollywood world.. to understand the depth and ‘direction’ that a Bollywood movie would give to the children in our homes…the Jack and Jill of yester years has been replaced with the sheela, anarkali and munnis of today…these can be loosely termed as nursery rhymes and anthems of our generation? The little tiny tots around us are shaking their hips and pouting their lips a la item number and not one of these moral goons have a problem with that??
This is the round up of our entertainment world that we are trying to protect from erosion? Our kids are exposed to the big black ugly world through umpteen channels and a movie will neither feed nor eradicate our kids’ tryst with Indian heritage…There is a web (quite literally) spun around us and we are definitely missing the larger picture…Firstly what is morality in today’s world? Who defines and erases these thresholds? What is moral for you may not be for me? What was moral yesterday may not be moral today? Where do you start the ‘tolerance limit’ and where do you mark the ‘end’ beyond which immorality commences? Questions that loom large and can a head or two make the definitions, find the answers, the root cause, make a judgment and enforce it by hook or crook?
