Expressionist

The staff of the Mumbai office of Star News was attacked Monday and its offices ransacked by about 50 activists of the so-called Hindu Rashtriya Sena after it broadcast an interview with a runaway couple – a a teenage Hindu girl and a young Muslim man. “The attack happened Monday evening because of a report that we carried. We have never heard of the group that attacked the office. They call themselves the Hindu Rashtriya Sena. It is difficult to say who they are. It was just a bunch of people...

The police in Mumbai have finally found something constructive to do as far as law and order is concerned — they have started detaining couples cosying up on the seafront. The Bandra police station has been conducting a special drive over the last one week or so rounding up couples for getting to close for comfort in public. Uh, too close? We have been told the exuberant policemen have so far detained close to 100 couples under the Bombay Police Act after receiving complaints from locals. These...

The Assam Assembly has gone one up on fanatics who want dress codes for girls in this country. The Committee of Ethics of the state Assembly has decreed that it is not appropriate for members to wear informal dresses such as jeans, T-shirts and salwar-kameez while attending the House. This committee has even recommended a dress code for members — men should sport formalwear while women should wear ‘traditional’ outfits while attending the House. This panel has conveniently not specified it means...

Whether the Indian government cared for the hundreds of farmers who have committed suicide in central India is something we can debate about. What we cannot is the fact that its commitment to safeguarding public morality is above question. Caesar's wife, you know. The custodians of Indian morality, the venerable Information & Broadcasting Ministry, has now banned Fashion TV for two months, starting on All Fools Day. No, we are sure the government is not playing a prank on us. It does not play...

It is now the turn of the Students Islamic Organisation of India to tighten the screws on whosoever talks about sex education. The organisation does not have even 10,000 members across the country, but is big enough to be a mischief-monger. Its activists have already staged demonstrations in a number of cities/towns. Listen to (I mean, read) these quotable quotes: Sex education is teaching pornography and instigating. free sex. When the Indian Constitution declares that a person is an adult only...

Medievalism rules supreme these days. So, when Kerala minister AK Balan made an off-hand remark in the state Assembly last week that "gods are depicted in temples without clothes on," it predictably created a furore — both inside and outside the House. Balan said he was "at a loss to know as to why an issue was being made out of sex education as there was no temple without murals and sculptures depicting scenes from Vatsyayana's 'Kama Sutra' and gods are depicted without clothes on." That got...

That's what the Madhya Pradesh government tends to think when it comes to the issue of imparting sex education in schools. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in the state has stopped sex education classes for high school students after it found that illustrations in an instruction manual for teachers were "obscene". The sex education classes were part of the Adolescence Education Programme (AEP) for Class IX and above, aimed at creating AIDS awareness among students. The "objectionable"...

Some people have no sense of humour. That's fine if they keep to themselves. But not when they literally coerce the police to arrest someone whose sense of humour may not be the same as theirs. That's what has happened in Mumbai where the so-called Sikh Media and Culture Watch (SMCW) staged a demonstration and forced the police to arrest a publisher of a Sardar jokes book. The Santa and Banta Joke Book is disappearing off the shelves of shops in Mumbai, and an emboldened section of the Sikh...

Four foreign television channels have been pulled off the air in Jammu & Kashmir after extremist groups demanded cable companies stop airing "obscene" shows. Cable operators, needless to say, have complied. Two militant groups — Al-Badr Mujahedeen and Al-Madina (ever heard of them?) — on March 4 in a telephone call to a Srinagar-based news agency, Current News Service, asked cable operators to drop channels that spread obscenity. The groups did not specify which channels they were referring to...

Information & Broadcasting Minister Priyaranjan Dasmunsi made AXN go off air. Now he seems to be dish out the same treatment to Fashion TV. For once, the Congressman and his friend in the Bharatiya Janata Party, Sushma Swaraj, seem to be thinking likewise. Great minds think alike. [ Link] “I have got the highest number of complaints from schools, colleges about Fashion TV operations,” said Dasmunsi, the information and broadcasting minister. “The kind of things they show, even in school-time...