Hear Evil, Read No Evil?

I dont have a tv. Most of the time, especially when important events happen like bomb blasts or police encounters, I am very glad I dont. I shall live longer perhaps. But when I am in delhi, I catch up with my older avatar- the channel surfing, remote control freak one. And I try and familiarise myself with 'popular culture' as they call it. Yesterday I even saw quite a bit of Balika Badhu, the latest soap in town. ya ya there was a moral in the end, but for what i saw they seem to actually celebrate child marriage.

Anyway what spurred this post was actually the movie I saw on HBO this evening. Though our regular Hollywood fare, it had the subtitles on and this is how the translation/transliteration happened.

we dint have , did we
if you are keeping away because we had , then you can rest on that account
i dont remember the last time i cried after so i am overwhelmed
you look very

and so on. yes! you can hear it but cant see/read the word. there wasnt even the --- or **** to tell you a (shhh) bad word was being used.

I guess the subtitles were for us, the poor desi audience, but was the censorship for us as well? Surely this is self-censorship, for I think even Balika Badhu may very likely use it soon. I can almost read out the moral -' kachi umar main sexual relationship bachpan ko khatam kar deta hai' probably after a scene where the kids have explored sexuality.

I remember gay and lesbian kisses being edited out of sitcoms in Star and Zee channels, and even then it was self-censorship, but this takes the cake. So why? And why only in print? And you cant even say 'you look sexy?'. Long long ago some filmmaker had to re-record the song 'sexy sexy sexy mujhe log bole' because the censor board asked for THE word to be replaced. The songs doing the rounds these days (and unlike tv i am very updated on those thanks to radio) have phrases like 'saiya saiya sexy lage hai mujhe' and 'I am craving for your body now'. Not to add that one of our lyricists' most favourite words 'shava' means sexual passion. My friend who has been dealing with urdu and persian words made this startling discovery and i have been scandalising people ever since. But we can put that down to ignorance.

So whats next? Lets activate our imagination and outpace them. Meanwhile I shall go catch some old episodes of and the city.