Not the Pune Mirror column

For those who've been following my Pune Mirror column, a word in your ear: the column has been taken off by the editor; my Friday column is now the editor's column. And more power to his pen and all that.
So here's what we'll do. I'll keep doing the column, and people can read it here.
It won't have an accompanying picture with an unintelligible caption, the way it appeared every Friday, but guys, you have to make do without some of the good things of life.

So here goes:

Countless Idiots, and counting
or
That's right, Blame it on the Three Idiots

We've been for a while now in an atmosphere where film makers, writers, painters, musicians, thinkers and just about everyone actually, is subjected to policing and censoring by people who dont have the brains or the inclination to really understand what the artist is trying to depict or say. Critical rigour is stamped out by the necessity to be politically correct and commercially viable. the two death-knells of creativity. In our over-grown baby civilization, looking inward, or standing there and taking criticism on the chin, is simply not on - the 'aggrieved party' will immediately blow spit bubbles and burn books/buses/libraries/offices.
Our infantile response to grown-up satire and depictions is reaching its zenith, now.
The latest to now come 'under the scanner' is the film 3 Idiots. The script is going to be re-examined, the newspapers say, to see if it instigated, wittingly or unwittingly, an adolescent to commit suicide and a bunch of medicos to rag their juniors, 'inspired' from the film.
At this rate, we really wont be able to depict anything except cotton-woolly romances, happy endings, college campuses on which shah rukh and rani or whatshername and whatshisface - oh ok priyanka and john or some such - cavort, weep, laugh and then marry.
Anything more 'real' will be seen as causing grievous harm to our psyches/traditions/culture yada yada yada.
By not looking at the deeper causes and prompts that end in suicides or homicides or brutal ragging, rapes, etc, and by daftly and always pointing fingers at the depiction of this stuff, we can continue to delude ourselves. After all it's a nation of many idiots.