Whither thou goest

With fringe elements being the headline hoggers ever since the new government came to power, couldn’t quite help to notice an alarmingly growing pattern. Whenever there is an “art work” – predominantly movies or write-ups, involving distortion of historical fact or extending their artistic liberty or contrary to long standing opinion, there seems to be hue and cry from everyone – both the opposing party and the perpetrator. The latest case in study being the “bhansali slapgate”.

Ithulam oru news? NE is bursting in seams with Nagas burning CM house and Manipur doing blockade with Assam again on the burn, the mainstream media has found a director being slapped by a guy and some rogue group disturbing his movie shoot as something worth primetime debate. Of course, it would involve some loud mouth-no brainer MP from ruling party, who for his want of few minutes of fame would say some nonsense trying to sound super intelligent and that would be the feeder for the whole week’s debate sessions. Probably its high time, panel presentations are banned in news channels. News has long become obsolete and are never conveyed. Its all opinion polls happening live in the guise of news. The viewer is not given the choice of forming his opinion, but is bombarded with cacophony of concentrated hatred and false and biased positioning of news channels based on the party they back. All things said and done, does a movie director getting beaten deserve that much publicity among all other things??!! Who decides what should be given more weightage? Probably the news editors who decide the content need to be sued for wrongful and willful misuse of their positions.

Coming back to the topic, what irks the right wing is that the queen has been allegedly shown in love with the invader. If the protestors are credible historians, who are fighting for misreporting of our history, then it would’ve been a different story and probably wouldn’t have seen the light of the day. Fact that it’s a “hindu” queen who has been linked with a “muslim” invader is cannon fodder for news channels. While the barbaric acts of the invader has been more articulated and has more evidence, whether such a queen existed is in itself is being questioned by the liberals. What, all these years we’ve been told and set as school syllabus has been put to sword in a single sentence. Even in such case, whether the script of the movie got leaked or was it all being done to promote the film, god only knows. But somehow, movie scripts, how much ever they are being protected, always end up in the very hands of those they are being held away from and no one reveals the source when questioned as to who gave them the tip on any particular scene!! Be it Khilji or Aurangazeb or any Mughal/afghan invader, our liberal media has always maintained a safe distance from their atrocities. Its almost as if, the erstwhile Indian kingdoms deserved to have been demolished and ransacked by them. Whatever atrocities they committed are never described anywhere and are at best given a passing glance in fewer lines possible. There would be reams and reams of paragraphs on Sati and caste related cruelties and widows ill treatment but never a word more on the barbaric acts of the invaders. At the same time, the crimes committed by the British are published with every word in vocabulary possible!!! There are historians and scholars who have dedicated their lifetime effort to chronologically list down all those crimes and the government even goes to the extent of securing apologies from the British for their acts. Why is it that while British are correctly labelled and questioned for their misdeeds, what makes the Mughals and Afghans noble saints? Are we supposed to refer to our history only from the start of British rule? Is our country only 300 odd years old as referenced by time it was enslaved by the British?

Note that at no point I am mentioning the name muslim. This post is not to request for blame game in the name of religion. These are facts. The fact that Mughals/Afghans invaded India for its wealth, fact that they destroyed our temples and culture and looted the places dry, fact that they were as barbaric as they can be. The question being, why is it not getting addressed the way it deserves to be? Is the media trying to mask the simmering inter religious conflicts or making it more potent by its selective redacting of facts? It all boils down to who should be the deciding authority on what I should decide? Leave the facts as they are and let the channels restrict themselves to present the news as it is and let the viewer make their own judgment call. In the name of opinion sharing, I think the country has gone to dogs. We have lost the sense of sacrilege for anything and are losing our self worth and heritage. If the landmass of the subcontinent was a bunch of warring kingdoms, that were all defeated and brought under one umbrella by the Mughals that was later established by the British which is the present day Indian union, what is the harm in stating it as is? If India as a nation is only as old as the British rule, what is the harm in acknowledging it? And if France and Spain and Portugal and Dutch and British can be questioned for their cruelty in the form of imperialism, why can’t the Afghans and Persians be? The whole world acknowledges them as invaders while they are revered here!!!

More than slapping any guy for making a fictional account of a story that is hardly substantiated by fact, as claimed, we should be slapping ourselves for letting lose of our history and analyzing information, rather than reacting to it.