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.
