Taking down the Fourth Estate

India, my homeland. Maybe it wasn’t for my forefathers, but it is the land of my birth and continued existence. And unless I’m declared dangerous to the population, it’ll likely see my death too. It’s not the best land, with its poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, disease and the occasional natural and/or unnatural calamity, but it’s not a bad land.
We’ve now completed 58 years of freedom from British Rule, the acquisition of which, considering the manner in which it was done, remains a feat in itself. India has more universities than any single country in the world, producing leading minds in research, economics and technology. India has recently asserted its nuclear capabilities, the stock exchange has been scaling unprecedented heights of late and, well theoretically anyway, we have a champion cricket team.
Hmm…maybe we are developing after all.
But every time I begin to feel the slightest swell of national pride, this country never fails to stomp it out and piss me off. The aforementioned plagues of this land have been covered so many times that it’s not worth even going there.
The latest “step forward” I’ve heard of on the news is the censorship of printed media… After film and television have been well sanitized “so as not to affect the viewers’ sensibilities”, the printed word remained the last bastion of mostly free speech. Now they’re threatening to storm that fort too.

I know press censorship isn’t anything new anywhere in the world. Censoring for government control and political reasons isn’t unheard of. But here the argument seems to be that parents need to be able to control what their children read. The focus would be mainly on “sexual content”, which is not a big surprise. Oh please! When was the last time you saw a nude centerfold in a newspaper? Or “Ten sex tips to drive your man wild”? Understandably, every country ergo every culture has its own mores and limits of tolerance. But there has to be some reasonable logic to it.
Censoring films and television is acceptable to an extent. They are, for the most part, fiction and can afford a few less cherries on the cake. But dropping articles from newspapers so your kid doesn’t ask awkward questions is just crossing too many lines. Until now the printed media has enjoyed the freedom to call spade a spade, while every other medium of mass communication has held its tongue. Take that away and you’re left with nothing but veiled words and winks.
Children are gonna grow up in a world filled with too many Parental Guidance tags. Newspapers will miss their big scoop the next time a celebrity loses her top because Junior gets curious when he sees the word nipple.
And that’s not all, what about the people who actually read the paper? Yeah, that’s right, the adults. We need the occasional tabloid trash to spice up our day. All we’re gonna have left is the little league version of the daily blah; hardly something worth wasting a perfectly good cup of coffee on.