"A burning bus? Perhaps over there."
There exists in Mumbai a nearsighted and rather unpleasant bunch of radicals who revile my very existence within their beautiful city. They want foreign actors out of Bollywood (that’s me).
They are the Shiv Sena – Lord Shiva’s Army and the MNS – political groups by name, violently quarrelsome by nature.
It behooves a writer to remain apprised of the legal ramifications of writing anything at all in India, because sedition laws are arbitrarily enforced and rather ambiguously defined as anything that “excites or attempts to excite hatred contempt or dissaffection“( - Wikipedia)
If anyone reading this gets excited or feels a smidge of contempt, then I’m going to jail for life – so please don’t. Sedition, in my opinion, is the most dangerous law in India – for exposure of real wrongs often leads detention or expulsion, as was the case with my friend who wrote of the Dalit murders in Gujarat and was summarily deported.
Let’s be mindful of that and carry on…
Bal Thackeray started the Shiv Sena and ran for a while a respectable right-wing, religious political party concerned with supporting the local Marathi people in whose state Mumbai stands. He was about ensuring jobs, health systems, pensions and education exclusively to Marathis, his ‘Sons of the Soil’.
They have a hard-line Hindu and regional agenda, and dislike all things non-Marathi – including shop signs spelled in English.
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