The All India Bakchod roast, which was uploaded on YouTube on 28 January and taken down a couple of days later, continues to be a subject of never-ending arguments. The members of AIB, stand-up comedians who used to be fairly active on Twitter, have gone eerily quiet on social media following the lawsuits slapped against them. To add insult to injury, Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan has now come out and very sanctimoniously declared that the AIB Roast was 'violent' and that he had scolded friends Karan Johar and Arjun Kapoor for participating in it.
While most of Bollywood has either stayed quiet or backed AIB, actor-turned-interiordesigner Twinkle Khanna has now written a column on The Times of India underlining the hypocrisy behind raging at the roast in a bid to save Indian culture where the real issues of the country are getting no attention.
She points out that while the entire country is busy being offended at trivial things like these, nobody seems to be outraging over serious issues. She explains how very few people seem to be leading an outrage brigade against the Sardar Patel statue in Gujarat or the Sivaji statue in the Arabian Sea. The statues will cost the states thousands of crores and Khanna asks why no one sees the irony in that, considering that only 10 percent of the country's children have the means to study beyond higher secondary.
Then she argues that while a grouse people had with AIB's roast was that it made fun of a person's sexuality, again, very few people seem to actively and continuously protest the fact that Section 377 continues to be a legal reality in India.
"The jokes about dark skin offend us because deep down, some of us idiotically think that having dark skin is a shortcoming. Would we be as offended if jokes were made about having fair skin like, 'You are so fair that you were thrown out of the Nirma washing powder commercial for being whiter than the washed shirt.'?", she writes.
Writing for the Times Group itself, Khanna says that the AIB roast is less offensive than Arnab Goswami shouting at people he invites on his show on Times Now - a Times Group channel.
While initially the Internet was trampled by coarsely worded outrage - by ones offended by the roast and by ones offended at the AIB haters - an interesting dialogue around issues of free speech is unfolding in the country at this moment. Aamir Khan's slightly dubious stance on the Roast, very recently, invited sharp criticism from Russel Peters who is slated to perform in Mumbai soon. He said, "Seriously, who is he, the so-called artist, to say that he found it violent and that AIB and rest involved should have been responsible? He did not even see it! Someone please ask him to shut up and take care of his own business."
The reason that Twinkle Khanna's support for AIB is refreshing, is that she is one of the few seniors in the industry who have spoken up on the issue, backing the actors and the comedians who participated in the roast. While most other senior actors and A-listers stayed quiet in public - perhaps in fear of stirring a hornet's nest - Khanna went ahead, despite her husband, popular actor Akshay Kumar's silence on the issue.
In contrast to an Aamir Khan, who chose to play to the galleries that at present are echoing with misplaced concerns about bharatiya sanskar, Khanna calls a spade a spade.
In pointing out that more Indian should be concerned about something like lack of education rather than their questionable ideas of what endangers 'Indian culture', she just says that the angry AIB hater is a jobless one, frothing at his/her mouth about completely irrelevant issues.
The fact that religious groups have managed to find the time to lodge an FIR and participate in a time consuming legal process to cut a bunch of comedians to size shows how superficial their concerns are.
Khanna effectively asks, have any of these groups bothered about the fact that so many children from their own clan are being denied formal education? Have they taken up cudgels again a stronger adversary like a political group or the state for that purpose? Obviously not, because that would require conviction and determination. Whereas ranting at the AIB will earn them fifteen minutes of television glory and keep them in the illusion of having done something for the society.
