Censorship and India - Here Is Why I Will Not Stop Using Torrents
Indian fans have been suffering a lot when it comes to enjoying their favorite movies or TV shows as most of the 'steamy' or 'violent content', which are sometimes crucial to the story, gets banned or censored.
But now with a hope that with the introduction of Netflix in India all that will change, fans might be relieved. But we still have movies in theaters getting banned because of varied reasons and most of the time the reasons make no sense. Here are some of those instants.
The 'impeccable white' bada parda
Let's face it, In India when we watch a movie we always do it twice. First in theaters and then we download them online just to see what we missed out or what might have been cut. Movie dialogues been cut out from the movies have been going on from a long time and every time it happens, the fans get disappointed. I remember watching The Wolf of Wall Street in theaters for 2 hours and later discovering the bitter truth that it is actually a 3 hour movie. They even cut out the times Hugh Jackman uses the F-word in X-Men movies and they are some of the glorious moments of these movies. Now imagine what they are going to do with the upcoming movie Deadpool . It is released after 7 cuts in India .
GIF
List of edited/cut scenes from Deadpool movie
That James Bond Kiss Scene
Recently the fans were outraged about the kissing scene that was cut from the James Bond movie Spectre. The internet responded to it with the new trend of Sanskaari James Bond memes and jokes. Maybe the censorship of some movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and Fifty Shades of Grey still makes sense (The latter shouldn't even have been made) but this is one of the most stupid reason to censor a movie. I still don't get how the censor board in India really operates. While some infamous rape scenes in Bollywood movies are shown with no regards to society (The Gunda for instance), the scene of a man kissing a woman gets censored just because it has two foreigners kissing each other out of love.
GIF
The 'Sanskaari' idiot box
Let's shift gears to our favorite Indian Television and all the ridiculousness that goes down there.
1. 22 minutes of GOT!
When in 2015, it was announced that the fifth season of Game of Thrones will be aired in the channel HBO Hits simultaneously with the US timings, a lot of fans (including me) were overjoyed. People even were ready to spend those extra 90 bucks on their TataSky subscriptions. But we had no idea what was coming. Or rather what wasn't coming. An episode which normally has a running length of about an hour was reduced to merely 22 minutes. And this is the same with other shows like House of Cards, Breaking Bad etc where content is removed for being even mildly sexual or violent. In one famous scene of House of Cards, Kevin Spacey is seen spitting on Jesus and that has been censored in the Indian broadcast. There is a scene in Seinfeld where a woman wears a bra as a top. Guess what happens to this scene in India. Fans of the shows will know how this ruins the whole experience as these are sometimes crucial to the story and without these the whole show becomes meaningless and ultimately bores. In a way, the whole TV viewing experience got ruined. And thus, people finally turn to Torrents.
2. *beep*
If you are a viewer of channels like Star World or ZeeCafe or any other channel in India that broadcasts American or British TV shows or movies, then you must be quite familiar with the *beep*. And nowadays this beep is even heard in the Hindi movies or shows aired on TV channels. Every now and then, the "explicit" words of these shows or movies are replaced by beeps or worse, they replace the words in the subtitles. It is due to the rule that was passed in 2011 that channels went paranoid and hence started muting or beeping anything that might be seen negatively by people. Comedy Central even got banned for a whole week when a viewer got offended by their show The Comedy Club. Hence even words like ‘Sex’, ‘Jesus’, etc are deemed offensive by one channel or the other and are either entirely muted, or changed in subtitles during an episode airing. Shows like Seinfeld and F.R.I.E.N.D.S didn't really have much problem before with their content but now every episode has some content removed or censored. There is an episode of F.R.I.E.N.D.S where the word 'Boobies' was muted the entire time because apparently saying 'Boobies' is enough to get a person excited.
3. Blurred Lines
And here is the funniest thing that the channels might think as a big plus but will somehow be the stupidest thing to see. TV channels have been popular to blur the content that they think are too explicit but what they might be unaware of is that blurring those explicit contents draw more attention to those regions. Cleavage blurring has been so common nowadays. If a girl somehow ends up wearing cleavage baring outfits, the channels end up blurring it most of the times. Sony Pix did have a funny incident with this though. During their broadcast of Charlie's Angels, they decided to blur Cameron Diaz's cleavage but Lucy Liu got a pass. Only god knows how this blurring thing really works in the minds of the channels. Another example includes an episode of Downtown Abbey, where two characters were having a conversation. In the background there is a small statue, almost negligible but the only fault of the statue was that it was of a nude female. And hence, the channel decided to blur out its chest and the groin region. Somehow people became more interested in the statue than the crucial conversation.
[Censored Content]
Well, for the fear of this article getting censored, I will hold back my words and get back to my aadarsh balak roots. However, we just hope that appointment of Shyam Benegal as the overseer for overhauling the rating procedure of the Certification board of India brings some hope, otherwise we seem to be en route to the Mughal era.
Popular Videos
Loading...