Gone are those days when precocious Indian kids and adolescents awaited the 11 pm movie on HBO, with eyes glued to the screen and fingers fixed on the remote, to embark on their fantastical trips to the allure of the forbidden pleasures. Today the horny teenager has bit torrent, red tube, persian kitties (or titties?), literotica and the likes at his/her disposal. The 12 year olds don't need Samuel L. Jackson to teach them the 'f' word- or the other popular American slang lingo. They have Facebook, for fuck's sake! They weren't born in the eighties and nineties, when Tom Cruise was the iconic bad boy with the sexy RayBan shades and American Pie was crucial to sex education.
I don't mean to beat about the bush. I'm not critical of popular culture. Yesterday, having nothing to do due to the heavy downpour in Calcutta, I was trying to watch The Social Network on TV. The film aired for the first time on TV, with all of the 'profanities' removed/muted. Earlier the 'f' words were either replaced by a 'beep' and/or a less 'obscene' 'fish' in the subtitles, while 'shit' was replaced by 'crap', 'asshole' by 'jerk' etc. and the late night films were telecast sans any editing. Now, not only is every colloquial word omitted from the dialogues with a '****' in the subtitles, each lip lock is brutally chopped out off the films with the display of a certificate from the Central Board of Film Certification in the beginning of the films.
In Fincher's film, Mark Zuckerberg played by Jesse Eisenberg, receives a note from one of his infuriated female classmates, which says "you dick"; on my TV screen, Eisenberg's character receives a blank note displaying nothing. Now isn't it insanely stupid to assume that there was a certain something in that note which compelled the protagonist to leave his class, and accept (as suggested) that we, the audiences, are not matured enough to be exposed to such inappropriate language? That, there, completely screwed up what would've been a delightful cinematic experience. What is Pretty Woman without a luscious Julia Roberts in her pantyhose trying to seduce an amused Richard Gere or Basic Instinct without Sharon Stone getting an entire team of investigators drooling! Will Planet Terror be the same film with all the blood and gore erased? Let me rephrase, will it still be a film? This is not entertainment. This is Doordarshan in HD. If this epic stupidity continues, then recent films like Love and Other Drugs would be left grossly butchered with about 60 minutes of the film edited during their Indian television Premiere.
The Censor Board isn't convincing in its actions all the more, with the rampant run of the titillating B-Grade films in shabby theatres of squalid shanties and several video parlours of suburban neighbourhoods. This renders the purpose of the Censor obscure, as to whether it is trying to inculcate certain moral values in the new generation (whichever generation that is)- may be they thought ‘oh whadda hell, one in every five people in India tends to be didactic so why not us! If the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting arbitrarily blocks AXN at the drop of a hat and makes MTV run an uncool apology in its own Tickr for a month, we have a perfect right to monitor and restrict the English movie channels, which are watched by a bunch of wasted Indian youth who never step in the polling booths in their lifetime!’ Or perhaps the scissoring is a decision unanimously concurred on, by the kingpins of politicking in the greatest democracy of the world over a bottle of Bislery. All goes well in the great Indian kitchen as long as Tulsi gets to keep her three husbands and twelve children- all illegitimate.
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