Karuna Nundy, Supreme Court advocate and All India Bakchod's lawyer. Karuna Nundy, Supreme Court advocate and All India Bakchod's lawyer.

Senior Editor Gayatri Jayaraman interviews Karuna Nundy, Supreme Court advocate and All India Bakchod's lawyer in the Roast case.

Q. What laws are you breaking in a ticketed Roast for a consenting audience and participants and how valid/relevant are they?

A. At the AIB Roast, none. The 4,000 adults in that live audience are signing petitions in support of AIB-they knew the show was for adults and everyone made sure there were no children. In two hours, the Roast raised Rs 40 lakh for charity.

The YouTube video had similar warnings and disclaimers, those who saw it chose to click on the link and could have stopped the video at any time. It's the online version that one person, each in Kanpur, Lucknow, Pune and Bombay saw and decided to launch criminal proceedings against.

Even if speech is truly legal, it's easy to complain that a crime has been committed in our country-violations, for instance of Section 292 and 294 of the IPC (on obscenity), Sections 67 and 67A of the IT Act (which prohibit the publication and distribution of obscene and sexually explicit material).

This is, of course, humour many might find unfunny, vulgar or even offensive-but that's not 'obscene' as the Supreme Court (SC) has made quite clear. The SC's got rid of the Hicklin test, whether a sensitive mind 'open to immoral influences' would be 'corrupted'. Criminal 'obscenity' is restricted to sexual displays with the intent to titillate, not vulgarity with intent to make people laugh.

The trouble is if you put someone through the criminal grinder they can go bankrupt, it breaks families, affects employment. Only at the SC stage are many exonerated.

The Bombay High Court has now examined the speech and ordered the police not to arrest anyone until the next hearing-AIB's Mumbai legal team placed some of these arguments before the court.

If you want to protect your kids, free internet filters and parental control software are available online, the internet can't be brought down to the level of a nine-year-old. Jail for rude jokes between friends is not what most people want-however public. It's not the social contract people signed up for.



Q. Did the Roast make dark people, fat people, feminists even more vulnerable?

A. Roasts are a new thing in India, it's comedy in which people make insulting jokes about each other-the AIB Roast doesn't perpetuate discrimination, it actually minimises it. That's exactly what many of our speech laws are trying to do too.

When gay jokes are being made about Karan Johar, for instance-the fact that it's being joked about out in the open and he has an equal ability to respond and everybody is clearly friends with him, makes it much more okay for those who are gay to be gay.



Q. The CBFC has released a list of banned words. What kind of a society are we headed towards if we must function on the basis of legally approved words?

A. The list is bizarre. You can't use the word 'screw' even if your character's hanging a painting, or make a Hindi film with "violence against women" now.

As Ludwig Wittgenstein first said-language is a social phenomenon.Editing specific words and ideas from films places an unacceptable limit on the imaginative and linguistic world of cinema that is India's greatest soft power.

'Bombay' is a word censored, what of the word Bombay in historical films on the city, what of the Bombay High Court, which very much retains its name? Is that going to be bleeped out?

So today's Censor Board couldn't pass the feminist Damini or even Bandit Queen or Ghar, which focuses on the impact of rape on a marriage. Women are relieved there'll be no violence onscreen, only in our lives!

It looks like we are only going to have films allowed that are to the greater glory of a political and moralistic ideology. This list wouldn't pass muster in any court. Until then many of Pahlaj Nihalani's films would have to be slashed or banned if screened-he's the creator of such gems as the songs 'Main Maal Gaadi' and 'Khada Hai'. He's also the Censor Board chief.