DUB Speak

AIB: Comedy turns serious

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“Knock, knock”

“Who is there?”

“OFFENCE”

“I will take the entire batch.”

This is not a joke, and none of the Indian comedians are courageous enough to take the blame of such offensive and obscene content. The above joke shall therefore be buried as an act of public indecency, never to be talked about again.

In a country where comedians are taken too seriously and the politicians, every five years, tell jokes for a living, the favorite pastime of the people is marinating themselves in ignorance and narrow mindedness while they fill up their bellies with moral policing and irrational conventions.

Soure: humanrightshouse.org
Soure: humanrightshouse.org

One such incident happened recently when the famous comedy group All India Bakchod, or more commonly known as AIB, posted an image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s lookalike at a railway station along with a photo of the PM with a Snapchat dog filter, captioned #wanderlust. This might be funny to some, but it gathered a lot of unnecessary heat. AIB was bombarded with criticism and this began a Twitter war of words (which, by the way, is a phenomenon more consistent than the Indian monsoon.) AIB was accused of insulting the Prime Minister and hurting “national sentiments” which might make a certain lot of the population wonder as to when did the country put all its nation’s respect, culture and emotions in the hands of a minister and what exactly is the “insulting” part in the above accusations.

 

Source: MediaNama
Source: MediaNama

An unexpected overreaction came on the part of the Mumbai Cyber Police when an FIR was filed against AIB’s co-founder Tanmay Bhat on Friday, 14th July. The FIR?was registered under section 500 of IPC and 67 IT act (punishment for publishing or transmitting obscene material in electronic form) at the cyber police station at Bandra-Kurla Complex.

Although this cannot be regarded as an obstruction of freedom of speech but in a very clear and bold manner, confirms the ill state of the narrow minds of the citizens. This entire drama testifies the intolerance instilled in our blood. Not only that, it brings out the fact that we as a nation are not only global leaders of the service sector but are also pretty good at picking up a not so significant issue, labeling it as one and then blowing it out of proportion. This is not the first time we have observed such an outrage questioning the basic institution of liberty. In many prior cases, comedians have received death threats, legal actions have been issued and have even been victims of public outrage both online and offline.

This  has become such a hobby that we have started taking offence in our liquor instead of ice and if “taking offence” was an Olympic sport, India will surely come second, because, well, we would still have corruption in sports.

 

Image Credits: india.com

 

Vardaan Suri
[email protected]

Journalism has been called the “first rough draft of history”. D.U.B may be termed as the first rough draft of DU history. Freedom to Express.

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