AIB Knockout: FIR against Karan, Arjun and Ranveer for 'filthy' language is *%$@#^%^

In a country where being offended is pretty much a statutory right across the board, the All India Bakchod roast bravely goes in where noone has gone before.Actually that’s not quite true, the infamous Arjun Kapoor-Ranveer-Singh-Karan Johar roast merely dressed up a lot of toilet humor, college dirty jokes and guys-will-be-guys insults and played it out to an audience many of whom had shelled out a lot of money for it. And then uploaded it with great fanfare on Youtube. It was designed to offend. And designed to go viral.What was unique about the roast was it dared to take what happens in private and present it in public. It unlocked locker room humour and uploaded it as performance. “If they are going to probe AIB roast for abusive language, they will also need to probe every college hostel in this country,” tweeted Chetan Bhagat adding that the potholes on Mumbai’s roads offended him more.The Maharashtra culture minister clearly is not amused. Vinod Tawde has deemed the video “vulgar” and said an FIR would be lodged. And since nothing unites religious groups as much as sniff of lewdness (remember their coming together against the case to repeal Section 377) the Brahmin Ekta Seva Sanstha and the Maharashtra Christian Youth Forum have filed FIRs against the filth.[caption id="attachment_2076241" align="alignleft" width="380"] Arjun Kapoor, Karan Johar and Ranveer Singh during the roast.[/caption]Yes, the show was vulgar, raunchy, salted and peppered with obscenities. It begins by warning the viewers about the filth to come. It could also be accused of racism, misogyny, homophobia. It was designed to elicit that gasp of “I can’t believe they just said that”. Much of the humour left me cold or even queasy. It was not about witty banter. Some of it was more mean than funny.Endless jokes about someone’s dark skin, someone’s sexuality, someone flunking his school leaving exam in the end start to wear thin. A fusillade of F-words can have a numbing effect. Rape jokes especially gang rape jokes are usually apt to misfire. But that’s never the point of a roast. It’s called a roast not a light stir fry.A roast has to leave burn marks. A roast has to be cooked at high temperature. You have to feel the burn. A roast is not well-behaved, a genteel visit to a punnery. Roasts go close to the edge and often over it.The adult-rated roast is making news because it involves stars, stars who are usually careful to present a far more manicured, acceptable, PR-airbrushed image to the public at large. If you went by the interviews given by our stars there’s no premarital sex, no extramarital sex of course and moving in together is something best keep a hush-hush secret. After Priyanka Chopra did her Reddit Ask Me Anything chat it was clear that the title was a misnomer.The cozy relationship between PR, press and star means you can ask about anything that’s already on the press release. But on the big bad world of the Internet she was bombarded with question about shilling for fairness products, a road named after her father, the social influence of beauty pageants. Looking at her non-response to many of the questions, Tanusree Bhasin writes on Scroll:

"Ill equipped to handle questions that matter, celebrities have been spoilt as a result of the mainstream media’s reluctance to do their job. Television and print media have succumbed to the tempting option of passing off giggling, scripted interviews as film news. Questions revolve around the celebrity's celebrity-hood, tip toeing cautiously around what are considered delicate areas, such as politics or plagiarism, while plunging with merry abandon into questions regarding love lives and pets."

In short our film stars have been turned into pin up puff pieces who never say anything controversial and rarely step out of line and if they ever do that’s quickly hushed up as well. And it’s amazing for us to see stand up comics actually dare to insult our screen gods. Not that screen gods don’t have thin skins. Bollywood Life reports Anil Kapoor was upset that they made fun of his accent and even more upset that Sanjay Kapoor and Arjun Kapoor laughed at the jokes.What the roast actually highlighted was our double standards when it comes to the our stars. What was more shocking than the F-word being bandied around was that it was the likes of Karan Johar bandying it around. It was like watching Mary Poppins and finding instead of a mouthful of sugar a mouthful of swear words.In a country where even fairly unobjectionable films routinely have cases filed against them (remember the barbers upset with Billo Barber?) it’s hardly surprising that the AIBC roast has raised the hackles of the nanny state. But what’s worth remembering is that as Tanmay Bhat of All India Bakchod points according to Medianama that what we saw on the internet is really only 60 percent of what went down that night. Forty percent was edited out because as Bhat puts it “10% because jokes weren't as strong on video, 10% because jail / pretty sure it is illegal to say that.”And therein lies the rub. What’s more interesting than the Tawdes of the world getting into a predictable lather about the vulgarity and the obscenity, is what even an allegedly no-holds-barred AIB knockout thinks is beyond the pale. The Quint has made a handy list of that. It includes the following:Actual smooching whether it’s Ranveer and Karan or Ranveer and Deepika. The same sex one got the bumble bee treatment, the opposite-sex one was completely edited out.Jokes about Salman Khan’s sister (though tasteless jokes about MTV’s bad boy roadies Raghu’s mother made the cut). But Salman has more of a temper and far more clout.Boney Kapoor and Sridevi jokes.Chetan Bhagat jokes not because they would have upset Chetan Bhagat because Quint says “NOONE really cared”.And Narendra Modi jokes.Bollywood obviously has to figure out the lines within the community that it cannot cross (there were no Amitabh Bachchan jokes either) because it must eat lunch in the same town tomorrow. But the Modi omission is telling because political figures are traditionally a comedian’s favourite and low hanging fruit when it comes to lampooning. But clearly the AIB team felt that they would get into far more hot water for making the PM the butt of their jokes as opposed to making bottom jokes about Karan Johar.Section 294 of the Indian Penal code which cracks down on obscene acts in public has been used by the moral police to harass someone kissing in public. But it’s quite another thing when it’s used against a show that from the get-go is meant to be offensive. But then in India the right to be offended routinely trumps the right to offend.