The Vulgarity Vultures

THERE’S BEEN A huge debate about the comments passed by some podcaster who apparently has a large following and the whole nation has erupted in a fit of anger, revulsion, almost shock, as to how this particular individual could use such language and that too in public?

Have we forgotten that the public discourse in this country has been abysmal of late? When politicians stoop to miserable levels, abusing each other both in and outside Parliament, no one says a thing. People desecrate women while talking about them. People talk about gender in a massively inimical manner. People abuse children. They talk about families, they talk about caste, they talk about creed, they talk about colour and we don’t say a thing. But when one silly podcaster, who obviously has a miniscule brain, makes some stupid comments, we now want to send him to jail.

What kind of India are we building if this is the India that we actually venerate? I’m not surprised by the comments of these podcasters because they, much like many others in the creative field, seek validation through numbers. So, obviously this podcaster wants his following to increase. But at what cost? And would you blame the podcaster alone? The fact that he has 20 million subscribers says a lot about us rather than him.

It talks about how we have become a dumbed-down society, how we are willing to trade intelligent wit for putrid vulgarity, how we as a nation have sacrificed satire at the altar of absolute abuse. So the blame, to paraphrase William Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, lies not in our podcasters but in ourselves, that we have become such a miserably abusive society.

Let’s then come to the entire issue of censorship. India has seen censorship of the worst kind. We’ve seen censorship where a person of Sahir Ludhianvi’s eminence was put in prison by Jawaharlal Nehru. We’ve seen censorship under Indira Gandhi when the Emergency was imposed. We’ve seen censorship by various film boards under successive governments, including this one, and no one has said a thing. Censorship is bad for any society because it is antithetical to the freedom of expression, which is a fundamental pillar of the freedom to create. So I’m not for a moment suggesting that we create avenues of censorship or that we have an ombudsman or that we have a super policeman which controls OTT and podcasters and such like.

But should there be self-regulation? There can only be self-regulation if you have a brain. But if your entire brain is tuned in to only exciting people, inviting subscribers, and creating a sense of hyperbole through abuse, you will never allow that brain to function in a logical and decent manner. And this is exactly what we have seen. And we are seeing this day in and day out. Why blame Ranveer Allahbadia alone? Look at the putrid content that is being created by apps like Alt Balaji and Ullu. These are allowed to go unfettered. You have content, creative content, so-called creative content on OTT, which is actually pornography of the worst kind. And yet no one says a thing. But when a particular podcaster, who obviously in a lack of judgement or perhaps lack of a brain, says this, the entire nation seems shocked, as if they’ve never seen this before, never heard something like this before. What are we doing with parenting in this country? What are we doing with knowledge in this country? Our education system sucks. Our syllabi are dinosaurian. And yet we blame a podcaster for what he or she does.

I’m by no means defending Ranveer Allahbadia. Let the law take its own course, if there is a law. Having said that, we have more laws than functioning traffic lights in this country. All I’m saying is that find purpose in course-correcting society. And that course-correction will not happen by a podcaster being less abusive. It will happen by a society being more aware, wiser, and more tolerant of the fact that we cannot allow vulgarity to be something that we venerate. As the famous judge John Marshall Harlan said in a seminal judgment in Cohen v California, one man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric.

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