“The BJP,” said Arun Shourie in a television interview once, “is merely the Congress plus Cow.” If the Censor Board chief had had his way, that might have been cut to “The BJP is merely the Congress plus”. The cow, like Kishore Kumar was during the Emergency, is banned from television. Unless, of course, it is in connection with good news, as when human beings are killed by cow-ards.
Writers, intellectuals and Nobel prize winners are having to unlearn words that have been familiar since childhood. Potential writers, intellectuals and Nobel prize winners are being asked to use cow-substitutes in school. Instead of “the cow gives us milk”, they are being taught, “the grocery store gives us milk substitutes”. The expression, how now brown cow has been changed to how now white elephant? You can say that till the hippopotami come home.
Just what harm did the censor board chief imagine Amartya Sen would do to India if he had been allowed to say “cow” in his interview? Thanks to the censor’s beep, it might sound like Dr Sen is saying “beef” instead of “cow”, which is rather like that Magritte painting where the artist looks at an egg and paints a chicken.
Other beeped-out words in Dr Sen’s interview were: 'Gujarat', 'cow', 'Hindutva view of India' and 'Hindu India'. Sad, because it meant he could not say, “I love the cows of Gujarat, they represent a good view of India,” and other permutations and combinations of those words.
Are all cow-related words taboo? Cowherd for one, cowrie for another? What about co-worker? Does the hyphen save the word like it does co-writer? What about scowl, where the cow is inside a larger word, and therefore protected as cows should be?
And what about cow-related products? Is it safe to articulate Betty bought some bitter butter, or “say cheese”, or even talk of the milk of human kindness?
I suspect the Censor Board chief is like the character Yossarian in Catch-22 . The novel starts with him recovering in hospital, and handling the duty of censoring letters of soldiers writing home during war. He is clearly the guru of our censor board chief. One day Yossarian cuts out all adverbs and adjectives from the letters; another day he removes the articles; then, bored at the monotony of his job, he cuts out everything except ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’. You can imagine the joy of the soldiers’ families when they receive letters from their loved ones that is just a collection of those three words.
My sympathies are with our censor board chief. He is not, as is widely presumed, intellectually challenged. Nor is he an osculator of the gluteal. He is simply jaded, a censor-bored chief.
Sen’s next interview, movies in all languages, books and newspapers will soon have everything censored except ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’. When that happens, the censor board chief will receive the Yossarian Award for diligence. Or, as the newspapers might say: the a an.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)
