Saturday, December 1, 2007

Aaja Nachle to the tunes of Mayawati

With my daily cuppa tea in my hand, I switched on the news channel this morning as usual, to check out whether the world changed while I slept ;P

Well the past few weeks have been quite eventful. News channels have been doin really well I bet! Full of action, drama and emotion they had all that it takes to keep the audiences hooked! There have been interesting, significant, unbelievable, shocking, surprising, disturbing, digusting happenings throughout the country and across the world, be it Nandigram and the left suddenly relaxing its stand on the nuclear deal post the incident & allowing the government to go ahead with the IAEA talks, or the Taslima issue, scenes of Adivasis being beaten up during their protests in Assam, or yet another incident of stone throwing protesting a Reliance Fresh outlet, emergency in Pakistan, violence in Paris, bomb blasts in UP, Narendra Modi and Godhra politics.... well I could go on ...

Today i heard of something as ridiculous as ridiculous could be ... of Mayawati banning 'Aaja Nachle' in UP as one of the songs happened to insult Dalit sentiments (????)... now i wondered what would have been the lyrics that could have possibly hurt the sentiments of dalits from UP... was it the line that goes... The only line I found some connection to UP went "mera jhumka gira tha bareilly ki bazaar mein..." nooo couldn't be that one....well when the reporter announced that the lines in dispute were "mochi chala sonar banne.." i looked at the TV screen with utter disbelief - how on earth is this going to affect Dalit people... Well then one would have to actually ban tonnes of movies which have similar dialogues...

Well the director was forced to apologise and edit those lines and the 'BENEVOLENT MAYAWATI' withdrew the ban... though Punjab n Harayana got inspired and implemented a similar ban... (incidentally Punjab has the largest number of dalits in India, well another statistic that was new for me). Yet another case of politicians playing the caste card. When will politicians like Mayawati stop taking advantage of the ignorance of the large uneducated masses???

All I can say for now is that ultimately hope all this publicity works postively for the movie!!!

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