The recent attacks in Paris once again brings to light the fact that freedom should always be used with care and respect
IT WILL BE ten years, this year since I moved to the UK. I left a very secure job at the South Asia bureau of The Times to pick up a scholarship at the University of Leeds and study International Communications.
It was 2005.
I had recently been married. From our flat in Vasant Kunj, I could see the Qutab Minar while sipping my morning tea. I had a car and driver provided for by the company that would ferry me to work every morning and back. We had a Labrador. Life was gentle, easy and smooth.
Then I decided to leave.
People looked at me like I was out of my mind - who leaves a job like that to be a student in a place hitherto read about in Jane Austen classics? Was I out of my mind? What would Jeeshu (almost brandnew husband) say? Were tremors in the marriage the real reason for my decision?
I didn’t feel any of the questions warranted a reply — relatives usually have a unique knack of tuning out logical explanations and nothing would make them believe otherwise.
I decided to not spend any energy on correcting misinformation and instead feverishly started planning my new life.
Ten years later, I am still here.
My aunt visited me from Kolkata this year- for her it is unimaginable why anyone would choose to live in a cold (comparatively) country, eat sandwiches for lunch and not want to have a home full of maids and servants.
‘I feel safe here,’ I said to her. ‘I feel safe walking home at 1:30am after attending a Christmas Party. I feel safe taking a taxi at 3am after having necked champagne at the annual Mobile Choice Consumer Awards and I feel safer still going into a bar alone, ordering a drink and sit drinking it by myself working on my laptop.’
‘I also feel secure in the knowledge that when I squeeze onto a ‘Tube’ (London Underground trains are referred to by the name), men wouldn’t be staring down my top and there wont be roving hands feeling up my skirt. I won’t have to suffer in silence while a man heavy-breathes on my neck and not feel my temper boil over when yet-another wannabe rubs himself up against me.’
She agreed with me on all those points and how India is becoming more and more unsafe at least for women as we hurtle head-first into the next decade of development. Crime against women has become a front-page staple in the past 10 years since I left.
And I am intensely happy about the timing of my leaving New Delhi.
I am very proud of the diversity, multiculturalism and freedom that is practised in this country and so it made me intensely sad to hear of the attack on the offices of a magazine of a French satire magazine earlier this month. Paris is just a 2-hour train ride away from London and I know of people who like spending their weekends in Paris, like we would go to Neemrana for a break or Rohtak to spend time with an aunt.
Two things made me sit up: The attack came a week after we returned from spending New Year’s Eve in the French capital and secondly, I too work as the editor of a magazine.
The attack brought about a very odd debate on the freedom of press. To me it wasn’t a question of the freedom of press at all. It was about how not to poke into matters that we might only have a very superficial understanding of and how it has all snowballed.
Majority of us live in democratic countries and exercise our right to freedom of speech everyday. How often do we meet someone for work who we might not like very much? And more importantly, how often do we tell them exactly what we think of them? We don’t. Because that would be tactless, foolish and downright insane.
Similarly, when we come across a good joke, do we go and re-tell it to our friends or the grouchiest person we know? We tell our friends, at a party in a private space. We leave Mr Groucho alone.
The one thing that I absolutely fail to understand is why Charlie Hebdo repeatedly and tactlessly made jokes about the Prophet knowing fully well that the jokes evoked nothing but intense discomfort?
I do not condone the killing of journalists. In fact, I do not condone the killing of anything on this planet except paedophiles and rapists but why would you want to joke about the belief system of someone who doesn’t want to be involved at all?
Chucking stones at a hornet’s nest is how I see it. You just let certain things be.
The real breach of the freedom of press, to me is what happened to Edward Snowdon. I recently attended the premiere of the documentary CitizenFour directed by the Academy Award nominee Laura Poitras and they showed how MI5 (UK’s secret service organisation) forced The Guardian newspaper to destroy all the hard drives with information collected by Edward Snowdon in the name of national security. You can find more information on the film here: www.citizenfourfilm.com
If there was ever a bigger breach of press freedom, I would be surprised. But what is incredible is that the film’s premiere happened in London without any interference by the Government and was followed by a Q&A session about cyber security and the government. While at the session, I had a little think about whether this would have ever happened in India..
We live in a very connected world and as we are realising now, it brings both good things and bad with it.
The killing of Fusilier Lee Rigby of the Royal Fusilier’s regiment touched me more than the massacre in the offices of Charlie Hebdo. Lee Rigby was an army drummer who was walking along a London street, unarmed, when he was set upon and killed.
He was the true collateral casualty of this whole sorry business of trying to arm wrestle into countries and debates we should have no part to play in.
Coming back to me — does this change how I feel about living here?