Dear CBFC, Indian Audiences Can Deal With Cleavage, Love-Making Scenes And Words Like F**K. Stop Censoring It!
We’ve just celebrated the win of Parasite at the Oscars 2020. It was a first for so many reasons and obviously, like audiences around the world, a lot of Indians watched this movie too. We emerged on the other side, completely fine. Not tarnished, not shocked, not shaken (except by the plot). We even watched that scene where a husband and wife have sex on the couch without putting our hands to our mouths in complete shock. And not to startle you or anything, but we heard the word fuck being said on screen and did not go and immediately wash our ears with gangajal.
This and a lot of other things might come as a shocker to the CBFC who are convinced that Indian audiences must be infantilised and fed only supposedly ‘clean’ content, lest they get corrupted. We are talking about this today because the CBFC decided that Love Aaj Kal, Sara Ali Khan and Kartik Aaryan’s movie that’s set to release on 14th February, must cut a few scenes to get a U/A certificate.
The CBFC asked that a kissing scene be reduced, that a love making scene be modified and shots of cleavage (of Sara, not Kartik’s) be blurred. They also asked for words like fuck and fucking be beeped, replaced or taken off altogether. And for fuck’s sake, we are so done.
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Can someone please explain why these things are so offensive? Does the Censor board really think that we do not use the word fuck in real life? Or that the mere mention of the word will have people leaving movie halls screaming in agony? This is how we speak, this is how we behave. How does the audience relate to characters if they don’t do anything they do in real life? Surely you know that no one speaks in dialogues…or maybe this is a concept lost on you.
And we would really want clarity on why cleavage is offensive at all. Women have it, and if they have sex, perhaps it will be there, in the frame. It can’t be so scary that you have to blur it out. Honestly, that stupid ‘Smoking kills’ slate that makes an appearance as soon as someone merely pops a cigarette in their mouth is more annoying than cleavage. Heck, Akshay Kumar schooling that man about now smoking but saving that money for his wife’s period necessities is way more offensive that cleavage will ever be.
We would really appreciate it if they would stop treating us like children that needed to be schooled on morals and abusive language and just treat us like adults. The audiences can deal with cleavage and sex scenes and words like ‘fuck’. So maybe you should calm down and censor stuff that’s genuinely painful to watch – maybe like the politics in this country – rather than bringing your small-minded morality to the big screen.
We can deal.
