The Silly Season of Offence, and Javed Akhtar’s Irreverence
So, Javed Akhtar is a “selective atheist”? Really? That’s like accusing someone of being a “part-time vegetarian” because they eat paneer on weekdays and butter chicken at weddings. It’s a joke—except in our poor excuse for a public debate, people are deadly serious when they say such things. Let us begin with first principles. As Benedict Anderson reminded us, nations are “imagined communities.” They are held together not by dogma or theology but by stories, symbols, songs, and rituals. In India, this imagination was never purely Hindu, never purely Muslim, never purely secular either. It has always been a messy, colourful patchwork woven from Tagore’s verse, Gandhi’s politics, Ambedkar’s law, and yes, Bollywood’s lyrics. Now, in this fabric, why must you prove your secularism by mocking every religion equally? Who came up with that idiotic standard? Religion in India is lived in fragments, in uneven doses. Salman Rushdie once joked that being Muslim in Bombay simply meant n...