Ram Gopal Varma hits the Censor Board hard

Ram Gopal Varma hits the Censor Board hard. The Censor Board, over the past few weeks, has been hogging the media limelight for all the wrong reasons.

The way it delayed and refused to pass Tamil films, Vijay's Jana Nayagan and Sivakarthikeyan's Parasakathi for theatrical viewing, awarding the censor certificate drew flak from one and all.

In the midst of all this, Ram Gopal Varma took the Censor Board head-on with this following post.

CENSOR BOARD is OUTDATED

Not in the context of just @Actor_Vijay ‘s #JanaNayagan ‘s censor issues but in an overall manner,  it is truly foolish to think that the censor board is still relevant today

It has long outlived it’s purpose, but it’s being kept alive out of laziness to debate it’s relevance now , and it is the film industry as a whole which is mainly responsible for this

We live in a time where a 12-year old with a phone can watch a terrorist execution filmed on a GoPro, a 9-year-old can stumble upon hardcore porn, and a bored retiree can binge extremist propaganda, indulge in conspiracy theories ,  from anywhere in the world, uncut, uncensored, algorithmically pushed. All of it is available instantly, anonymously, and without a gatekeeper.

At the same time, everybody in every wake of society speak in abusive language from new channels to YouTubers and from other apps ..If you quote that age old belief that cinema is a powerful medium , don’t ignore the fact that the social media has far more reach than cinema .and it is full of political venom, communal poison, character assassinations, live, uncensored shouting matches in the name of debates.

And in this reality, for the honourable censor board to believe that cutting a word in a film, trimming a shot, or blurring a cigarette will “protect society.” is a Joke

The censor board was born in an era of scarcity when images were rare, access was limited, and the state controlled the media . Cinema halls were crowd points. Newspapers had editors. Television had schedules. Control made sense then.

But today, any form of a control is impossible because no one can no longer decide what people should or should not see

In such times as now, censorship doesn’t prevent exposure… it only insults the viewers .

We are supposed to have smartness to decide who should rule us but not what we want to see or hear ???

What the censor board actually does now is not protection, but only theatrics  . It’s a ritual of authority in Oscar worthy performances where scissors replace thinking, and moral pretence moves around in a disguise called responsibility.

The same society that freely scrolls through graphic violence on social media suddenly becomes “concerned” when a filmmaker shows something in a theatre

This hypocrisy is dangerous

Censorship assumes people are children forever as if they aren’t even aware what all things children have access to?

Cinema is not meant to be a classroom where lessons are taught . They are mirrors , view points , expressions and opinions meant to entertain

The job of the authorities is not to edit or cut them out, but to trust citizens enough to decide for themselves ,which is the main point of freedom of speech and expression, guaranteed under the constitution

If the argument is “think of the children or adults who are like children “it takes very less intelligence to understand that they cannot be protected by blunt scissors wielded by committees ,whose own personal tastes pass off as public morality also not to forget their bias and agendas .

Age classification makes sense. Warnings of the content makes sense. Censorship does not.

Continuing to defend the relevance of the censor board today is like insisting on a watchman for a building whose walls have already been broken and everyone can see what’s inside

The world has already moved on to so many platforms which are unfiltered and unsupervised and so the painful question is whether the authorities have the courage to admit that they are obsolete, and more than that, whether we as a film industry collectively have the will to question them on the same

So instead of raising this topic once in a while over a particular film , the fight should be with that particular system of thinking which created the censor board