Need a law to deal with people's intolerance against creative content: Kamlesh Pandey

“If we want the country to survive as it has existed for thousands of years, and retain its identity, I think there should be a law in place,” veteran adman and screenwriter Kamlesh Pandey said in connection with the Tamil Nadu Government’s recent call to ban the Amazon Prime web show Family Man 2.

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Sharing his thoughts during a live interaction with BestMediaInfo.com, he said, “Our country has respected all kinds of views from all over the world for thousands of years. So if this country comes to this kind of narrow-mindedness, we are heading towards a very bad scenario.”

Pandey’s views hold all the more significance at a time when the government itself is providing a platform for people to raise objections against objectionable content on the OTT medium. Through the IT Rules, 2021, the government has created a three-tier grievance redressal mechanism via which people can raise their concerns.

Pandey believes this intolerance also requires a response from people who are involved in media, arts and literature as the communities have become insecure.

“It’s a psychological thing. The communities have become insecure and they feel that they are under attack, irrespective of which community they belong to. They feel that it will damage them and they need to survive it,” he added.

The veteran adman said it's important to differentiate when some content has been made deliberately to offend someone and when it is a part of an intellectual pursuit or a debate.

“Sometimes it can be in bad taste when somebody is doing it just for cheap popularity. That is really wrong. So that differentiation is important to know when something has been made to make someone insecure, afraid or to offend someone intentionally. Why can’t we create that culture where we are ready to debate things and not ban everything? We, as a country, have been known to be accommodating,” he said.

Pandey said that it is very unfortunate that people have become very sensitive now. Comparing them to the touch-me-not plant, whose leaves fold up and droop down on being touched, he said it wasn’t like this during his times.

“This is something that the government or the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has to look into. In a huge and diverse country like ours, almost anything can offend someone or the other. So I think it is a very sad reflection on our sensibilities. We have become unnecessarily too sensitive,” he added.

Sharing the example of his recently released Ramyug, which is an adaptation of Ramayana, he said many questioned him on how he could do this to the Ramayana. “I got fantastic responses mostly from the young people. But yes some said, ‘This is not Ramayana. How could you do this?’ There are 300 versions of Ramayana and they have many differences among them. Our country is known to be accommodative of each other's views and opinions,” he said.

Watch the full interveiw:

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