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The opening in a multiplex —which, in my naivete, I had presumed would be a private screening — had all the hoopla of a movie premiere: flashing cameras capturing preening actors, television networks recording self-conscious sound bytes, the need to be seen rather than see evident in the empty seats in the auditorium.

Ironically, in a way, the film being premiered was Madhur Bhandarkar’sTraffic Signal, a gritty, cinema verite-ish look at the beggar-hawker under-life at a road junction. (‘In a way’ because the celebratory society event to launch a work on the poor and the deprived has become so commonplace that its incongruity is no longer a surprise).

Another irony which struck me that evening was that the high spirits and joyous mood of the evening may have the life-span of Jade Goody’s fame. There’s the Damocles’ Sword of the Film Censor Board to always reckon with, especially for a movie that’s got some connection with reality. There is the devil of the box-office, always unpredictable, often armed with a death warrant. And finally and ultimately and overridingly, there are the Super Critics, the freelance men with big sticks and loud voices whose services can be rented gratis when someone wants to stir things up a bit.

It’s unlikely that Traffic Signal will have too many unsolicited reviews from these Super Critics: its targets are too secular and too generalised to offend them. But just a week earlier another film had a similar event and look what’s happened to it:

I am talking of Parzania, Rahul Dholakia’s film on an incident in the 2002 Gujarat carnage which now cannot be shown in that state because the Bajrang Dal has so decreed.

There was a time when the Film Censor Board’s vicious scissors ensured that making a film on a controversial subject was like committing hara-kiri. Amazingly things have begun to change, so that now the censors bring a distinctly more liberal attitude to cinema. Anand Patwardan’s documentary features as well as Rakesh Sharma’s The Final Solution, a documentary on Gujarat’s pogrom may have had their problems, but they did get their certificates as did Parzania, and earlier, Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday, a film about the Mumbai bomb blasts of 1993. But in all these cases, the movies were brought to a grinding halt just when they were ready to go.

One reason is the lack of availability of distribution channels for films that take a risk. But even here, things are getting better (though much too slowly) as Parzania’s and Black Friday’s example show. What’s getting worse is the ubiquity of Super Critics.

As it happens, in today’s India, it doesn’t take too much to play Super Critics (perhaps better called Super Censors, because critics can only can a film, not ban it.). Black Friday’s director Anurag Kashyap was involved in the production of Deepa Mehta’s Water when it was originally to be shot in Varanasi. He has said in a recent interview that a handful of people overnight formed an organization called Kashi Sanskriti Raksha Sangharsh Samiti, and made enough noise for the producer to abandon the shoot. In a similar way, I am sure Parzania’s problem is due to a small local unit of the Bajrang Dal whose pracharak gave it a bad review.

In our volatile country where tiny sparks can often lead to large-scale violence, it is easy to see why governments are jittery at the first sign of trouble. So they take the easy way out and ban the book/film/play, before you can say, “Hey!". The disease has now spread so much that even Christian organisations have jumped on the Ban Wagon of Islamic and Hindu fundamentalists.

But the easy way isn’t always the best way; here it clearly is the worst possible way. That’s because the brutality, the wickedness and the sordid side of our world need to be confronted, and only creative artists and the media have the ability and the will to expose them. Obviously, they can’t do this without help. As it happens, if the government had the will, it could easily get the CBI to quickly assess the depth of feeling and thus effectively deal with the situation.

Even that wouldn’t solve the peculiar problem of Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, where the government itself is guilty of complicity in mass murder. Why on earth would it permit the truth to be shown? Even here, there is a way. Which is that the Centre could force it to. But to do that, the Centre should first set an example, shouldn’t it?