The decision of the Supreme Court to lift the Maharashtra government's ban on James Laine's 2004 book, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, throws up some interesting points.

First and foremost should books be banned in this day and age?The newspaper Mint has a rather interesting editorial on it. (You can read it here). The basic point the edit makes is banning books in this day and age does not work.

"The reason such bans do not work is because the nature of the books business has changed. Paper isn't the only medium through which ideas or stories can now be communicated. Many of them can be communicated through digital media. And while piracy (just to clarify, this newspaper is against it) prevents the creators of content from being rewarded for their efforts, it ensures that books and movies that aren't meant to be available in a particular region are-freely," the edit says.

A good case in point is Hamish McDonald's biography of Dhirubhai Ambani The Polyester Prince. The book is banned in India, but is freely available in the pirated form at most traffic signals across metropolitan India. It can also be downloaded freely from the web.

Mani Ratnam even made a movie based on the book. Anyone who has read The Polyester Prince and seen Guru will tell you that the movie is an unabashed copy of the book, Aishwarya Rai notwithstanding. Also Guru was presented by Reliance Big Pictures, which is ironically owned by Anil Ambani, Dhirubhai's younger son.

With so much happening, the book continues to be banned, which doesn't make any sense at all.

The other famous banned book in India is Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. The sequence of events that led to the book being banned and then a fatwa being issued is rather interesting.

The book was released on September 26, 1988 in the UnitedKingdom. Khushwant Singh reviewed the book in The Illustrated Weekly, with a suggestion that the book be banned because he apprehended that it might create trouble.

India became the first nation to ban the book on October 5, 1988, after Syed Shabbudin, a member of parliament, petitioned the government to ban the book. Rajiv Gandhi, the political novice that he was, banned the book immediately.

And so all the trouble around the book started. On Feb 12, 1989, there were wide spread protests in Islamabad against the book and six people were killed. Next day there were protests in Srinagar and one person was killed and over 100 injured.

It seems Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran saw these protests on PTV and on Feb 14, 1989, Valentine's Day, issued a fatwa against the book and the author. Rushdie had to go into hiding after that.

Only if Rajiv Gandhi been politically a little more mature and at least decided to read the book or get a few people to read it, before deciding to ban it, things could have been different from the way they turned out to be.

But common sense rarely works in a country where those who shout the loudest are heard the most.

The book of course continues to be banned in India. But for those who want to read it, can log on to www.amazon.com and order it. In fact you can also order it on the Indian website www.infibeam.com. (Click here to order the book).

The more pertinent point here is how could anyone feel that a religion as old and as widely practised as Islam could have been in danger because of one book, written in a language that most people who follow Islam neither read nor write or for that matter understand.

In fact, people who felt that Islam was in danger because of just one book, where essentially questioning the faith and the belief, millions of people had and continue to have in Islam, worldwide.

The controversy also helped Rushdie prolong his career as a writer. This despite the fact that most of his writing has never been able to match the Midnight's Children, the book for which he won a Booker prize in 1981.

The interesting thing is that Rushdie wrote a lot of books after The Satanic Verses. One of the books The Moors Last Sigh had a dog named Jawaharlal. This book was never banned in India and continues to be freely available everywhere. Guess, nobody who could get the book banned got around to reading it.

And that's precisely the point I am trying to make. People who create all the ruckus to get a book banned, never get around to reading it. So most of them don't know why they are protesting. Or are they are protesting because somebody has asked them to protest or because everyone else is protesting.

That is clearly the case with James Laine's Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India. Shivaji Maharaj is a well revered figure across Maharashtra and India. His exploits against the Mughals are well documented. The faith people have in him is huge. And one book, cannot take that away. So what's the point of protesting anyway? In fact by protesting, and trying to get it banned, protestors give undue publicity to the book and make people want to read it more.

And people will read what they want to read. How else do you explain the fact that Hitler's Mein Kampf sells more than Mahatma Gandhi's My Experiments with Truth? (Read the complete story here). Now does that mean that we should go ahead and ban Mein Kampf? And will that ensure that more people will read about Gandhiji?

PS: Oxford University Press the publisher of Laine's book has decided not to print any more copies of the book (You can read it here). But rest assured the book pirates must already be working on the book, I wouldn't be surprised if the book does make an appearance across the traffic signals of Mumbai, anytime soon.