Letters: Censoring a piece of art

This refers to Vanita Kohli-Khandekar's column "Is the censor board going overboard?" (Media Scope, March 18). There are reasons to believe that the Indian film industry is self-sufficient, offering jobs to millions of people and also entertainment to the masses and classes. The Central Board of Film Certification was probably conceived to be a platform to assess the depiction of any content which, according to the board members, might cause some sort of disturbance in our society. This compels the ruling government to invest time, money and energy in not so important things, in particular when the situation could have been avoided. But certainly, the censor board was not meant to perform social or moral policing on film-makers.

Are we sure that the perspective of the film-makers and that of the audience are always the same, if not conflictively different? We know that they are not. Many a times, it has been found that the masses had missed the message and reacted to a wrong perception of a scene or a dialogue. Now, it can always be argued that censor board members are also not always seeing the film in the same perspective as its makers but they watch it more from the viewpoint of the audience. The debate on whether there should be any censor at all to any creation of art is never-ending. But according to me, a beautiful thing does not need to be explained and hence curtailed. And, things that need to be explained cannot be beautiful, and if curtailed, do not matter.

Ashok Chakrabarty Kolkata

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