‘Freedom means using our art to speak the uncomfortable’
One striking line we heard recently was— “We all take the world we are born into as the baseline for a ‘normal’ world.” So the generation born after 9/11 in US might assume Islamophobia to be a natural state of being. Or the generation born into the mobile-Internet era will not feel that strange sense of wonder we landline-era people still feel while using the ‘new’ technology. Or, as a Kashmiri girl asks an army man from another part of India in Shoojit Sircar’s Yahaan, “How do people in rest of India sleep without this background noise of constant gunfire? Don’t you feel odd?”
Freedom can mean a million things to a million different individuals even in a single country. It all depends on the privilege and social status you are born into and, for us, the world will be a better, freer place if we all are aware of our privileges or lack of.
For us as artistes, freedom means the right to use our art (writing/ comedy/lyrics) to speak the uncomfortable. Comfortable, pro-majority, pro-establishment baatein bolne ke liye toh hamesha hi freedom hota hai. But the real freedom or the real test of a free society is to see how it deals with the voice of dissent, an ‘offensive’ snapchat video, or a joke against one of the many holy cows we have
“LIKE ANIMALS KNOW WHEN A QUAKE IS ABOUT TO HIT, HUMOURISTS CAN SENSE A SOCIETY LEANING TO CENSORSHIP”
cultivated. Like animals are the first to know when an earthquake is about to come, a humourist is the first to know when a society starts leaning towards censorship.
As individuals, freedom for us means privacy and a right to make our own very personal, very individual relationship with our society, country, and symbols of identity. Our diverse world is fast turning into a simplistic, low IQ creature, and one of the reasons behind it is our fear-driven thinking in binaries. We hope (though we might be stupid to still have hope) we all think of ourselves as individuals with personal freedoms first and not as sheep in a herd going grazing, being guided by a mountain dog, living in the fear of wolves. Because that thinking ends up making wolves of us all.
(As told to Asmita Bakshi)