Passionate About India

When he sees elderly idealistic looking people in the audience, he himself says that he knows he is blamed as the symbol of a decadent culture! In fact I almost jumped with surprise when he said that in one of our IIPM shows, for those were the exact words I heard from my dad just a few hours before entering the venue! Later, he laughed it off saying he knows that’s how parents often look at him!! Actually that’s what sets him apart.. While most stars in Bollywood wouldn’t have ever used the word decadence in their lifetime, SRK can use it upon himself and laugh! That’s the intellect and spirit that sets the King Khan apart from all his contemporaries. While it often seems he is torn between going the Amitabh way of completely dignified existence or the Salman way of brashness, the fact is that he is just himself! As his supporters vehemently tweeted after the Wankhade stadium incident that he is most caring and soft spoken, specially towards children.. He most certainly is. Till he is...

I write this not as my editorial, but as a protest to see if there are any listeners… because my blood boils in anger over the way another human being in the world’s largest democracy is being robbed of her freedom of speech. And the way everyone from the mainstream media to intelligentsia has maintained the conspiracy of silence! Taslima Nasreen, the author of famous books like Lajja and Dwikhandito (the book whose controversial passages landed her into trouble with various Muslim fundamentalist forces of West Bengal), has been under virtual house arrest in New Delhi, ever since West Bengal government decided to throw her out of Kolkata, her home for the last three years. Much like Salman Rushdie, she had dared to write about Prophet Mohammad’s wives in a questioning tone (which of course under mental trauma she asked her publishers to remove from her book about two months back). Unlike Hinduism, which has evolved as a religion, thanks to tens of reformers (can you imagine the days of...