Thank god we only have fringe lunatics in our country, writes Suhel Seth

Thank god we only have fringe lunatics in our country. The kind who will break down stores selling Valentine's Day goodies or perhaps lock up an innocent girl for putting up a post on her Facebook page. Can you imagine having the French type loonies living amidst us? I would be dead a long time ago. In fact I almost died the other day when I failed to recognise a sports icon who was ready to hit the poor festival director, a frail not-so-young Parsi woman, and me. I know what the perils of humour can be. But then, herein lies the tragedy. We are an intolerant world only because we have begun to take ourselves too seriously. I write an agony Uncle column in a newspaper based in Calcutta. If people were to take my advice seriously, I would be the one dying rather than the ones asking me questions. Humour is for evolved societies, which is why what happened in Paris, was shocking. I can understand if this had happened in Saifai once you had finished deriding Mulayam or his eloquent son Akhilesh.

We in India are blessed. Our terrorists appreciate humour only because they don't understand it. Equally important is the fact that we have an overwhelming Hindu population, which has learnt to laugh at itself without self-combusting. Can you imagine one half of Hindus believe Ravana to be evil while the folks down South consider him to be angelic. Then we have our politicians. We make fun of them every day and yet they don't mind. Yes, some of their goons might come and beat you up or throw stones at you, but then, that is where it stops. No politician has ever ordered someone's death or else half of India's journalists, TV anchors and irritating guests like me would have been dead a long time ago. I have made fun of Mayawati and gone to Lucknow on delayed flights but have never been hit. I have ridiculed Mamata Banerjee but then given how busy she is with scams in her state, she hasn't done a thing. I have spoken about Digvijay Singh's love affair; about Rahul Gandhi's supreme IQ or for that matter about Jayalalithaa's fiscal integrity and not one person has gotten back to me on any of the above. I even wrote an article many years ago on the five most boring people in Delhi and met all of them the following day, and not one came up to hit me. Of the five, I am on the guest list of four to this day. The fifth died last year.

I suppose in India, terrorists have yet to wake up to the fact that satire is dangerous. It is the ultimate threat to religion and beliefs. A cartoon can destroy the image of your God. The Prophet or for that matter Christ or even Lord Ram are all-sacred and cannot be ridiculed. It is another matter, while fleeing the scene of crime, those three cowards in Paris shouted out the name of their God. How goddamn ridiculous?

If we can't laugh at ourselves, we needn't wait for bullets. We are being slow-poisoned in any case. Poisoned by the intolerance and hatred of a few who believe they represent the many. More damage has been done to Islam on January 7, 2015 in a liberal Europe than good. But the people who killed didn't know this. It has nothing to do with Islam or Hinduism or for that matter any religion. Ultimately we need to separate the wheat from the chaff. The ones who kill in the name of religion are murderers and please let's not give them the pedestal of honour by calling them jihadis or protectees of a way of life or a belief system.

I am not giving up hope. Certainly not in India by any stretch. I don't think we are going to have people come to us with guns and fire away. For two reasons. There are so many people making idiots of themselves in our country that the spectrum is wide. Every day you can make fun of at least a hundred people for their idiocy. Secondly, given our population and traffic, getting to people like me or other satirists will be so exhausting that most of these intolerant blokes will blow themselves up before they reach the wells of humour. And finally, I do believe, given all that happens in our country every day, not to mention on our TV channels every night, there is so much to laugh about, that picking the ones you want to get rid of will be an arduous and life-consuming task.

So let's keep making fun of those we need to and hope we remain safe. If not, we'll be dead and there'll always be the symbolic candlelight vigil.