AIB to be roasted by Maharashtra government, who's the joker now?
Massacre satirists, behead lampoonists, prosecute comedians, murder humour. The governments of our country too - one where freedom of speech and expression is supposedly more than just blank words - seem to be following in the footsteps of staunch fundamentalists who blow people up for propagating humour. Every newspaper comes with a space designated for the resident cartoonist, and every once in a while, there's something called comic relief, interspersed with the most serious of news items on the best of our news channels.
Political satires and jokes apart, when a public figure happens to be roasted in public - and they happen to have consented to the same, one doesn't really know who ends up being offended. The scenario here is as stupid as stupid can probably be. This defies all logic and definitions of idiocy. The All India Bakchod (AIB) Knockout video, where the four AIB guys and a host of other celebrities got together to "roast" Arjun Kapoor and Ranveer Singh, was released for the public a few days back. And as is the case with any form of art - many people watched it, had a good laugh, and went about their daily lives, a bit lighter. Several others screamed their lungs out and said how the AIB jokes were "spoiling the Indian culture". And now, we hear, the Maharashtra government has ordered a probe into the roast. Yes, and here we were worrying about why the roads in Mumbai had holes the sizes of craters, why women's safety was not exactly the best of its strengths, why people were plagued by poor law and order problems.
Stupid as it might sound, the insult jokes that were thrown at the ones being roasted the other day in Mumbai have insulted people who had absolutely nothing to do with the roast than the ones who actually braved the insults. So much so, that TV channels called the AIB guys obnoxious names and dedicated hours of airtime to them, only to prod the government into considering a probe into the act.
The live event took place in Mumbai in the month of December. The tickets to the event were for about Rs 4,000, all of which had been donated to various charities. There was not a single eyebrow raised back then. A month-and-a-half later, when the video happened to have been put up on YouTube for public consumption - for free - a section of people began crying "slaughter of our culture".
Seriously, the ones who are always offended at every damn thing - maybe learn a lesson or two from the people who were on that stage that day. Learn to take a joke in the right spirit instead of shouting out your vulnerability to people. No, our culture is not attacked when someone happens to make a joke - no matter how innuendo-laced it may be - as long as the person the joke is being made on is not offended. And well, if you've actually watched that AIB Knockout video, you'll see that people decided to laugh everything off. That's what the country today lacks, and needs the most. The ability to laugh at itself. Because by acting the way the "offended" people are acting, we're at a serious loss of understanding here. Who, after all, are the real comedians in this case - the guys who cracked jokes after jokes and wanted to be taken lightly, or the ones who seem to have set aside every other graver worry and ordered a probe into things as light-hearted as jokes?
As Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor said in that roast: Haaw! How can they talk in public like we talk in parties! Abusive words and insults hurt because nobody likes to be abused and insulted. The insult comedy works only because of mutual consent. We as Indians must protect our culture and its inherent hypocrisy. Karan Johar used those four-letter words in front of his mother. Ranveer in front of his girlfriend. Arjun in front of his family. They took it sportingly. The roasters and roasted have no problem, the easily offended people watched the video and were easily offended. What kind of pious men check out a channel whose last name is Bakchod? Exactly. The hypocrites.