Bollywood Censored by Derek Bose is better avoided. Insofaras the sub-title goes, ’’What you dont see on screen and why’’, the answer is simple - the censors snip it off.
Bose tries to sound very knowledgable and technical about censorship, but never ends up saying anything at all.
Sex and violence, as well as currently sensitive issues are the areas when the censors come into play. Bose skims over everything else, and a good 90% of his book dwells on sex.
Never mind - whereas on one hand, he argues for censorship, he concurrently argues for abolition of censorship. On the very next page, he makes out a case for selective censorship. The reasons he gives for all is so fluid, unconvincing, and utterly churlish that it makes this a book written for idiots.
Bose quotes, often quite out of context, people who are anyway incompetent to speak either for or against censorship in Hindi films. Many are failed film directors/ producers who have nothing better than sex up their sleeves to sell their films. Or, our Indian brand of art film makers, who just wish to rake up a sensation about almost any current issue and tread on powerful toes, merely to come into the limelight. The central debate which Bose tries to get into (when he is not too busy describing titillating scenes from various films) hops around all over the place, as if trying to find something to say that will please everybody. From womens’ organisations to political parties to school kids to family to film personalities and even attempting a rural-urban diasporic assessment, he just talks a load of rubbish. And repetetively, at that.
At almost 200 bucks, the book is not worth anything near that.