All atwitter

The issue is sexual repression. You can't ban it away. Or solve it on Twitter

We have become a nation of angry people. In the last one year, we have witnessed how the common man, overcome with rage, has taken to the streets, to protest, to react and to say "no". Rage is good when it gets you to go out and deal with what you have a problem with. But I do think that, somewhere, our collective rage is going out of control. We have stopped thinking rationally.

In the guise of rage and outrage — Twitter's favourite currency — we are in danger of becoming a nation of lynch mobs. We are on the lookout for a soft target and once we spot it, we take out all our pent up rage on him/her. This is what I feel has happened with the recent case of Punjabi bhangra rapper Yo Yo Honey Singh.

Let's be real — nobody was aware of his songs until this controversy about the lyrics flared up. These songs have been on the net for years and they were dying a quiet death. Even I wasn't aware of them, or of Honey Singh.

I'm defending him because I have a problem with this irrational behaviour that we as a nation seem to be now showing. We are getting caught up in a kind of elitism — intellectual, moral and even at the level of individual conscience — where some people, mostly on Twitter, deem themselves intellectually or morally superior to decide what is good or bad for a majority of us.

Certainly, you can have a problem with what Honey Singh is singing (just for the record, the song "Balatkari" was written not by him but by the Pakistani band Zeest and I absolutely agree that those are horrendous lyrics). But that doesn't mean you ban him. He has a right to exist and sing about what he wants to. We have the choice not to listen to the song or go to his concert. Singers like Honey Singh exist because there is a market for them — there are consumers who consume his content. He is the symptom of the problem, not its root.

... contd.

ALSO READ

'We don't appreciate each other... When people ask me to quit, do you think it doesn't affect me? And how often do you want me to resign?'

National Interest: BJP's troubled House

No yuan for growth

China's rebalancing act