In a statement, Rohinton Mistry made his opinion on the matter public almost a month after his book came under attack.
A day after Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray made grandson Aditya the head of the newly-formed youth wing of the party, resistance to the 21-year-old’s opposition to Rohinton Mistry’s book Such a Long Journey gathered momentum.
At an event organised by the Citizen initiative for Peace, a group of NGOs and independent activists, Committee for Release of Dr Binayak Sen, and the Mumbai Initiative of Human Rights Education, on Monday, people debated the promptness with which the Mumbai University procedures were subverted by its vice-chancellor to accommodate the “fears” of a party that has inflicted a “depressingly familiar, tediously predictable script of threats”
In a statement, Mistry made his opinion on the matter public almost a month after his book came under attack. In the statement, read out by documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan, Mistry said, “He [university vice-chancellor] is, we are told, a PhD in statistics — a useful subject for dealing with permutations, combinations, probabilities but silent on the matter of moral responsibility.”
Laying the onus on Welukar, Mistry said, “The university, in the person of the vice-chancellor, occupies an exalted position in civilised society, the champion of academic independence and freedom of expression. Instead, Mumbai University has come perilously close to institutionalising the ugly notion of self-censorship”.
“As for the grandson of the Shiv Sena leader,” he says, “What can — what should - one feel about him? Pity, disappointment, compassion?... “He can think independently, and he can choose.
And since he is drawn to books, he might want to read, carefully this time, from cover to cover, a couple that would help him make his choice,” commenting on the fact that Aditya has not even read his book. Mistry made two suggestions — Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness and Tagore’s Gitanjali, from where he borrowed the final lines of his statement: “Where the mind is without fear…”
Theatre personalities Dolly Thakore and novelist Meher Pestonji read out excerpts from the book.
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