Thoda Dikhao, Thoda Chupao

Last week on some random night I ended up watching television a little later than my usual timing because of my perpetual state of ennui and imagine my surprise when I settled in to watch a movie only to find that I was unable to hear half of the words in most of the dialogues. 

I could contend with that cause it's happened before, but what I couldn't deal with was the random fade-to-black moments, the complete skipping of some scenes and (here's where things get absolutely ridiculous) a translucent rectangle floating over a woman's chest!

Granted, the woman was supposedly a stripper and the movie was one from the 'American Pie' series, but still it's the principle of the thing.

Here's a list of things that make our television viewing experience seem like a trip down an Alzheimer patient's memory lane:

(Next few paragraphs may contain profanity or some other shit like that; if you affiliate with the RSS or the Shiv Sena please fuck off right now lest I offend your sabhya, satvik sensibilities)

·        Cut The Kiss

Apparently, the censor board has a misconception that seeing people kiss on television will make us nymphomaniacs, so they came up with the brilliant idea of cutting out all kissing scenes from the English movies.

And they don’t generally remove a scene, what they do is focus on the sides of the frame rather than the scene playing inside it.

The result- a frame full of hair!

Why would I watch that? Why??

·        Play It Slow Baby

One particular channel has found the perfect solution to fade-to-black: slow down the playback, skip the scene and then resume playing at the same speed as if nothing happened.

Makes me wonder if they’re telecasting pirated CDs.

Pitiful, just pitiful.

·        I Swear I Won’t Swear

This is so bloody common that most of us don’t even notice it anymore. There are certain words that can’t be spoken on television and radio, actually seven of them, but according to our Broadcast Ministry, there are a hundred or so.

So, what they do is they either replace these words with gentle on the ears euphemisms or they skip them altogether. Not even a beep or anything, just a blank moment where once a word resided (clear disregard of the space-time continuum).

I don’t see how a Ned Flanders style swearing will keep people away from the real thing.

I mean, I still know ‘crap’ means ‘shit’, ‘heck’ means ‘hell’ and ‘gosh darn’ means ‘god damn’ and I do use these words occasionally so what’s the point of changing them?

·        Dhumrpan Varjit Hai

A television channel can’t show a person smoking a cigarette and hence use the aforementioned translucent, floating rectangle to hide them.

So following this norm, when they decided to show an item number from a movie, they were fine with everything from the short ghaghra-type thing and the non-existent choli that the actress was wearing but there was a weird thing obscuring the cigarettes that people were taking puffs from.

Does that mean it’s not right to smoke but it’s perfectly fine to wear such stuff in public?

What I can’t wrap my head around is why does the Broadcast Ministry allow the channels to show such movies?

If you think that the audience isn’t mature enough to handle things like swearing, smoking, snogging and shagging then don’t telecast shows or movies that contain these. 

In a bid to seem open-minded and forward, we broadcast such material but then our hypocrisy rears it’s head in the form of cuts and snips and blanks.

So, either you’re willing to accept that the public knows all this and telecast everything in it’s entirety or you admit that such things make you cringe and don’t show them at all.

The choice is all yours.

Because hypocrisy will lead us nowhere.