Anurag Kashyap has quit twitter ostensibly because his family was threatened over his political views.
It is difficult to imagine the filmmaker, not known for taking a backward step, being forced to abandon starboard and beat a hasty retreat. But so often are the celebrity denizens of the net faced with a deluge of negative reactions that they tend to scurry for cover after the initial bluster. While the net still remains the cheapest and most effective platform to express and promote oneself, to reach out and be recognized, the lack of education of the larger mass who are being addressed, forces extremely distasteful reactions and the handle becomes an abuse fest.
The verbal ejaculation of the crudest thoughts are initiated by people who are either agents or those who are strongly opposed to the basic purport of the tweet and without the mental capacity to grasp or indeed the ability to express themselves coherently.
About Anurag himself, his tweets do not always emerge from his area of expertise and that is why many are inclined to dismiss his opinion as inconsequential.
More importantly his tweets at times border on the aggressive and end up offending people who are irked by his supposed know-it-all attitude on issues to which everyone is entitled to an opinion, as he is too; but that of course should not invite anything apart from criticism and healthy debate. Even as Anurag would himself admit the odd abuse or two can be easily negotiated but it is a no-brainer that it can never aggravate to a situation where the safety and security of kith and kin are left hanging in the balance.
The tweet from where supposedly the controversy emerged – “You know what is scary, that one man thinks that he knows exactly what’s the right thing to do for the benefit of 1,200,000,000 people and has the access to the power to execute it,” brought in a wave of condemnation and trolling in its wake.
There are of course different ways of looking at this: First it would be a fallacy to assume that the current regime has initiated an era of the muffling of the anti-establishment voice. The exponential growth of the target audiences as a result of the communication platforms available amplify the message and unsettle the targets because a lot is at stake. Since the entire battle is being fought out in a public forum the fallout plays out like an extended opera with the numerous stakeholders involved in a no-holds-barred battle. In this power struggle Anurag has taken on the current dispensation and so it necessarily follows that the repercussions will be significant. It would have been so under any government and under any party with any ideology. Anurag says “There isn’t going to be reason or rationale.” He adds “Thugs will rule and thuggery will be the new way of life”. But when Anurag says “one man thinks that he knows exactly what’s the right thing to do for the benefit of 1,200,000,000 people” he is not exactly treading the path of the reasonable either.
In truth he has totally ignored the tremendous support that this decision seems to have garnered, and the fact that a large number of his fellow citizens were waiting for the day when this would happen (the abrogation of Article 370 was a part of the BJP’s manifesto).
In the past Anurag has made no bones about where his sympathies lie but he would do well to give a little more credit to the judgment of his fellow citizens and not resort to tweets that would indicate that a state of deterioration in every sphere is the result of the doings of the current government. His tweets by their sheer sensationalism invite extreme reactions.
This is the baggage that the man carries from his past as people react more to the man than his comments. The nature of new media is such that it gives everyone a voice and a reach. Probably that voice itself does not presume a capacity to organize thoughts in such a manner that would indicate plainspeak without being inflammatory.
Having excelled at scripting dark movies which take the alternative route the ‘Satya’ man should have been perspicacious enough to predict which way the tide would flow, or was he planning to raise the tide !
Article By : Shantanu Sharma
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