Skip to main content

The friendly FOE - Freedom of Expression

Like clockwork, FOE comes back in news every 2-3 months. It's not surprising it comes up this often in this age, where every second person is a blogger (ahem) expressing their views freely to be intercepted by hopefully one or 2 people if he/she is lucky or has any friends. Jokes apart, with millions of people active on social networks it is hard to say something stupid and get away with it. Internet always remembers, but tends to have a short attention span also.

A few days back, Tanmay Bhat from AIB made a snapchat video swapping Lata Mangeshkar and Sachin's face. The kind of thing 2 year olds find funny. But then apparently he said some uncool stuff. I haven't watched the video, neither do I intend to. Don't enjoy his kind of humour. Coming back to the video, people were obviously offended about the mockery of their idols. I hate Twitter on such days, everyone is outraging over the same thing (for or against). Just no escaping it.
I understand FOE comes bundled with FOEE, Freedom of Expressing Exasperation, why not use it wisely? In all likelihood, the video was meant to raise eyebrows, there's nothing like bad publicity. Tanmay ruled Twitter for 3 days. Heck his video was also on News Channels. NYT also featured an article on this drama. Sigh.
Mission accomplished Tanmay! Give yourself a lick pat on the back. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Oops We Did it Again

What happens when you run around in circles? You get nowhere and if you're on earth a year passes by. We're back where it all started. After a round of lockdowns, aggressive tracing, testing and treating, government throwing up its hand in defeat, the virus magically diminishing from the population, we have arrived at the doorstep of another round of lockdowns. We went from tracking COVID numbers to tracking vaccinations and back to watching COVID cases quadruple every week. But this time, the government machinery is focussed on vaccinating the most vulnerable population, they might not even have the bandwidth to set up another trace, test, treat task force. But do take comfort in the fact that there won't be any vessels bangings even. On Social Media we have gone from questioning the number of cases & death reported to questioning our vaccine choices to cribbing the vaccination pace is no good and now we're again trying to find pictures of every cremation in this c...

Can't touch that

One might not have heard of a temple called Shani Shingnapur before a group of women activist decided they wanted to enter the temple. There isn't really a ban on the entry of women in the temple (unlike Sabrimala), the ban/prohibition is for touching or offering oil to the deity. This hardly should be news. There might be 100s of temples where women are prohibited to enter where the idol is or to touch it. So my very first reaction to this was, a big SO WHAT? This is what years and years of conditioning does to you. As a woman/girl, you so often hear these words:"You can't do this", that I have probably become immune to the ones that seem frivolous to me. Yes I'm not a big worshipper. So what is the big deal here? Hinduism is really big on idol worship, if you hadn't noticed. An idol to us is a form of God, and hence the need to keep it "pure". Temple which have these bans, cite menstruation as the cause. Women are considered impure during their...

Je suis Charlie ou Je suis Ahmed ou Je ne suis Charlie! Qui suis-je?

Je suis Charlie ou Je suis Ahmed ou Je ne suis Charlie! Qui suis-je? The shooting in Paris last week that shook the world, resurfaced the modern day debate on Islam and its follower. The twitter world was flooded with the hash tag #JeSuisCharlie subsequently followed by #JeNeSuisCharlie and then finally yielding to #JeSuisAhmed. It is one of those incidents that shake you up completely. In a world probably immune to the atrocities carried out by the likes of ISIS & BOKO HARAM in bulk, shooting a few cartoonists by some loony extremists shouldn't surprise us. Even if it doesn't surprise us, it should shock us. This didn't happen in a conflict zone or in a politically unstable region. The attack wasn't carried out by an organized militant/terrorist foreign group. It is scary that in a crowded, lively city of a stable country with a decent judicial system, 3 of its citizens just decided that a certain group of people doesn’t deserve to live. What is...