Ghumakkar's Diary

" Great soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his struggle with India ” by Joseph Lelyveld, is the recent entrant to the List of banned Indian Books . What’s interestingly peculiar about this Pulitzer prize-winning author’s book is that probably none, who justified the ban, have read the book; and this imposition is all based on some British tabloid review. I haven’t read the book, but a few reviews of learned Indians who read it, plainly talks about a homoerotic relationship between Gandhi and Kallenbach as seen by the author through Mahatma’s letters. To some, the term may appear as a gamble of words, my question is what’s wrong even if Gandhi ji was a bisexual. Now, when we are changing into a nation that allows homosexuality, wouldn’t it be dramatically non-sense to question Gandhi ji’s inclination ? In fact, don’t we adore our same-sex friends for their beauty, figure or physique? Does all that mean we are sexually inclined towards them? Bullshit! Regarding the racist comment,...

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth... Few days back when I came to know about a book on an Indian Business Barron on the Banned Indian Books’ List, the first thing that came in my mind were the lines from Tagore . What an irony, we live in a country, whose forefathers have dreamt about a nation without fear, about a nation with right to speech, right to knowledge; and where the Government enjoys the “privilege” to “freely” ban the books, censor what it feels offensive! Wikipedia describes Banned books as the books whose free access is not permitted. Further it says that the practice of banning books is just another form of censorship, and often has political, religious or moral motivations. In our country, banning books have got its history since the British rule days. In fact, few of the Books ...