And obviously the controversy never really ended. We still saw Salman Rushdie splashed across newspapers and on television, because we could not get enough of the man. Journalists have wondered over the attention that the Satanic Verses’ author has elicited inspite of his absence from the Jaipur Literature Festival. While some maintained that the author should have been given due importance and security, to facilitate his presence at the fest, others like Markandey Katju, Chairman of the Press Council of India and former Supreme Court judge say that Rushdie isn’t worth all the commotion.
On the other hand there are liberals who feel that the man and the world should be spared the drama because the book never really did anything to anyone, except for bug a few people, mostly those who haven’t even read the book.
One can hardly picture a group of blood thirsty intellectuals wielding swords and guns chasing Rushdie because he blasphemed the Islamic faith with the book that again, hardly anyone read.
There is an immense capacity in the human mind to stretch matters out of proportion; to make a mountain out of a mole hill and more often than not and become subjects of ridicule. There are many of us who will eventually feel silly for having written about this, but the knowledge of this will still not restrain us from doing the same. And yet we write on, letting other matters slip by as we fine sublimity in disappointing web links that never happened.
Celebrated authors, at the Jaipur Lit Fest probably felt ignored because no one even bothered about them. We will not deny the fame that those got from reading excerpts from Rushdie’s book. Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Jeet Thayil and Ruchir Joshi were hailed as heroes as they went against everything and read the excerpts. We are still waiting for reports about some four authors who were pelted with tomatoes by a group of extremists alongside a photo showing four unfortunate individuals being chased by youths who probably don’t have a clue about why they were committing the act in the first place.
The whole chain of events triggered by the alleged threats from extremist factions has taken comical proportions and has reiterated the fact that the media is just as gullible as the common man, who is just as clueless as that monkey in the zoo who doesn’t care about anything but its next meal.
The intention is not to demean any section of existence be it the media, common man or even the monkey. The point is that we all just got sucked into a whirlpool of nothing, wasted our time and felt jolly good about it!
