If you have to tell people you are powerful, you aren’t.
Earlier this year, the SC retracted one of its hasty decisions after lengthy and, to a large extent, pointless debates on playing of the national anthem before screening a movie.
In the first installment of the case, it said something like, “Every cinema hall must play the national anthem before screening a movie and it should happen for every screening.” Now, it says something like, “Okay, that’s just optional. If you don’t want to, you can skip it.”
But the theatres are quite rattled. SC judgement or not, there are quite a lot of self-proclaimed, saffron-variations of “patriotic” goons who might be irked if a cinema hall did not “opt” to play the anthem before screenings.
And so, PVR at Orion chose to play the national anthem before every screening at the international film festival. That’s about 60 times (give or take a few) every single day of the 12-day-long fest.
Before the screening, the volunteers from the organizing committee would introduce the movie and then add, “Please respect the national anthem while it’s played.” The Kannada variation was, “We request you to respect the national anthem by standing up.” They forgot to suffix it with the exception given by the SC order for the disabled. But I digress.
It seemed funny and it reminded me of that phrase I’ve noted at the start of this write-up.
If you need to remind people to respect the national anthem, something is very wrong with our country.
The country is like a teenager. Teenagers are rebellious. You can force them to do something for a short while but that will only make them hate the very thing you are forcing them to do. Pretty much that’s what happens when law muddles itself with patriotism. Sadly, folks like Dipak Misra, a blot in the annals of the Supreme Court, do not understand this. Like most parents who refuse to understand and empathize but live solely with the need to establish their dominance, they force others into doing their bidding. In the aftermath, even the regular patriots have nothing more than indifference and loathing to give to the nation.
The history of playing national anthem at events is chequered. To be sure, this is one more of many unoriginal adoptions we’ve made from the outgoing British Empire. Just as too much of anything delectable only leads to a vomiting sensation, playing the anthem at the end of every screening led to people walking out. Someone was sensible enough to plug this by saying it was not necessary to play the anthem at the movies.
But with the onset of a new right-wing wave of patriotism, we’ve regressed back. And we have “smart” solutions - like playing the anthem before the screening. That way, you make sure no one leaves and whoever is inside the hall has to stand-up. The Supreme Court - the highest judicial office in this country, mind you - was so observant and attentive to details that it completely forgot about those with disabilities while writing the first version of the order. Or, may be it thought patriotism would cure disabilities the way dramatic patriotic movies depict. To be fair, I don’t discount the presence of wheel-chair-bound patriots who get up heroically from their wheelchairs despite all odds just to pay their respects to our anthem. But the SC should have exercised some sensibility in its first judgement.
The ideology seems to be to enforce patriotism. But how can one enforce an idea? Not without coming off in clean dictatorial terms.
People think that a few stunts like “ghar wapsi” and compulsory national anthem will submit this country to a wave of patriotic vigor but what we see is hardly that. People abandon their countries for others because we are all driven by a simple principle: to seek and obtain happiness (and it’s a pity most of it is material happiness). Wherever that is available - in abundance or not - we go there. Most stay back because the costs and risks of obtaining that happiness are too big to own. Very few stay back because they are willing to sacrifice something so palpable for their home country.
Which is why, in the name of patriotism, what is happening in India is an anti-Muslim drive charged by two kinds of people. One, the sanghis and their many variants and two, the Islamic fundamentalists who want revenge for Sohrabuddin, Ishrat, Gujrat and more.