Who needs parental guidance when you have a group of guardian angels called the Censor Board that deems what’s fit to see (or hear) and what’s not.
If you thought Bollywood is the only body that specialises in leave your brains behind pursuits, take a closer look at the Censor Board of India.
Leave your brains behind may be just one of the many genres in Bollywood, but it seems to be the maxim the Board swears by. Say the word ‘sex’ and what you get is a bunch of people more confused than a puberty hit teenager.
To cuss or not to cuss? Is it okay to cuss just once? True, flowers aren’t kissing each other anymore, but uttering words like ‘naked’ and ‘virgin’ is still a no-no.
‘Religion’ is the second most confused territory in this context, but for that we have the several over-sensitive rabble-rousers to blame.
We don’t know who’s to be blamed more, a section of fault-finding junta or the upholders of decency sitting in the Board.
But the result is more absurd than Ajay Devgn’s dance moves in Action Jackson. Now that should have been censored.
Temple: Who would have thought of all the words in the dictionary, our guardian angels in the Censor Board would deem “temple” too risqué for the eyes and ears. In a song in Action Jackson, it was replaced with the much less naughty “statue”. This in a film that has a heroine who worships her Romeo’s lingam, and is willing to pull all strings to see him with his pants down because she believes his willy is her lucky charm. The Romeo merrily gropes her when she feigns unconsciousness. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. The decency army sees nothing wrong with this of course. The film makes the smooth U/A cut with the dangerously obscene “temple” chopped off.
Naked: This happened in Happy Ending: You can be half-naked, with bare minimum covering your vital parts, but ‘naked’? Oh no. Would nude be okay for the board members? We don’t know. But ‘penis’ certainly is. So Happy Ending wasn’t allowed to go “naked” but it did not get castrated either. How kind.
Ch***ya: If the film is gunning for a U/A certificate, then it can be allowed only once, (because once is okay for minors, we are guessing). So again, Happy Ending was passed as the word was uttered just once, and it was barely audible. But in films where they punctuate sentences with ‘ch***ya’ have to be “adults only”. It’s after all a grown-up thing to do.
A****le: It was changed to “asses” for a more universal appeal in yes, you guessed it right Happy Ending.
F***/Fu*****/ Fu****: F*****s became fockers in Happy Ending, (looks like the Board had a field trip on this one). Then in Haider Shahid was allowed to say “fu***d” but again they ensured it was barely audible and gave the film one big “A”.
Hazaam: This word, which means barber, was asked to be muted in Ek Villain, as years ago the usage of the word in Billoo had irked the barber community. It’s another matter the rest of the film too should have been censored because no matter what figures say, many communities may have been irked by the sheer inanity of the revenge saga.
Kutta: You can say doggy but you cannot say kutta. The English translation cloaks the animal in decency.
Virgin: If ‘temple’ and ‘naked’ are impure, how can ‘virgin’ have a free run? The Board objected to the word in Finding Fanny initially, but then it was reminded how Preity said it in Dil Se and Alia hinted at it in 2 States. So the virgin was allowed to be.
Sex: The word ‘sex’ was chopped off in Queen. It also blurred out a shot of cleavage. The word and the cleavage shot were both used in context, and not meant for titillation. The film has scenes in a strip club and a sex-toy store, but the word ‘sex’ was just not fit to use.
Rape: In the film Mardaani, that was based on human trafficking, the Board asked for the rape scenes to be toned down. Some of them were even described as “biologically inaccurate”. Whatever that means.
Abdullah: Johnny Lever’s character in It’s Entertainment was initially called Abdullah and in the film it requires to be deliberately mispronounced. The makers were asked to change it to Habibullah because tainting Abdullah would have been more dangerous than getting playful with Habibullah.
Ungli: The film is about showing the middle-finger to the system. But guess what got blurred? Yes! The middle finger. So we have a story about a bunch of youngsters who call themselves the “Ungli Gang”, they have an apt logo too, but the version that was deemed fit for the U/A audience had the stuck out middle finger blurred.
Bastard: The director of this film was asked to change the title as “bastard” was deemed too offensive a term. So the film got released as Children of War. The film is based on the Bangladesh genocide where thousands of women were raped resulting in countless illegitimate children. But “bastard” even in this context was considered
profane.
