Vivek Agnihotri Quotes

I am utterly confused and tired. Everything is becoming clinical. I remember in 1985, a Leftist friend of mine had tried explaining the Naxal organizational structure to me, and finally exasperated, he’d said, ‘Trying to understand the Naxal movement is like peeling an onion. In the end, you will have only tears in your eyes and many disconnected and scattered layers of the onion.’

I didn't get up from the corner of my study couch until I discovered a unique and dangerous nexus between the Naxal mafia and middlemen disguised as intellectuals. Like Prasoon would have desired, I had inverted the pyramid of intellectuals. I had found the theme of the film: Intellectual Terrorists.

They work exactly like religion. Most religious books are based on fear. If you do this, that will happen. Nobody knows what ‘this’ or ‘that’ is. Social justice, if it has to come, will come only from a free and fair market. Why didn’t our liberals tell us this simple truth? When agendas, vote banks, and self-delusion take over, reasoning and sympathy are needed to keep up a common conversation. Without it, there is aggression, deafness, and an obsession with purification; hence the divisive politics of Boutique Liberalism. Boutique Liberalism is an Indian tragedy and a very damaging detour into the quicksand of communalism. Indian Liberalism has come to mean the colour opposite of saffron. That’s their failure. In a desperate attempt, their new mantra is – ‘We don’t care if you are a murderer, we want to know whether you are a liberal or a Sanghi murderer?’

Somewhere in the race to survive in Bollywood, I started telling stories that I believed people wanted to hear, and not the ones I wanted to tell. The ones which ought to be told.

The intellectual hierarchy has been demolished. It’s a sad commentary that in the world’s largest democracy, writers’ protest has become a subject of jokes. The power-hungry artists, writers, academics, and media-persons in India waste a huge amount of time making political statements to hide behind their lack of intellectual stands. Michel Houellebecq wrote Submission, a strong political statement; he didn’t get press coverage for returning some award. The lustre is gone from our intellectual discourse. Secularism has lost its ideological currency. Artists, writers, activists are all suspect. Media czars have lost their access to the corridors of power and to people’s hearts. It’s the overclass’ space that has been taken over by the underclass. Their discomfort is with the new order where the others are also heard. Hence, the feeling of shrinking space. They are intolerant of this new phenomenon – the emergence of the underclass. They try to devalue this new, empowered underclass by associating it with Modi and, therefore, Hindutva, and that’s a grave mistake. The universe that was full of their voice has expanded to accommodate this new voice. This is what they call an attack on FoE and growing intolerance.

If your fellow ‘secular’ filmwallas feel so strongly about the ‘secular foundations’ and its preservation thereof, how come they never uttered a word against the Muzzafarnagar riots? Or against Shri Mulayam Singh Yadav? Or Azam Khan? Or Abu Azmi?

Shrimati Sonia Gandhi also issued an appeal a few days ago. Is it a coincidence that your appeal is reinforcing exactly the same? Can you vouch it for yourself and the other signatories that none has ever been a beneficiary of Congress’s alms? And that none of you have any vested interest, no political agenda? And no one is firing from your shoulders? If not, where was the need to get organized and send an appeal in such a hurry? Did you send this mail to all listed film professionals or just to those who you knew will sign blindly?

Sonia Gandhi led UPA has brought us to this. Where Indians are pitted against Indians.

I knew at that very moment that I would never be invited by Barkha on NDTV again and that is exactly what happened, but ‘Intellectual Mafia’ became legitimate jargon in social media.

I remember Prime Minister Modi sharing his belief that the cultural space shouldn’t be ‘rajya aashrit’, government-dependent, as it takes away the voice of reason but it should be ‘rajya puraskarit’, awarded by the State. And without ‘fearless cultural evolution’, we would be a robotic society. He clarified that he never received any request from any ‘kalakar’ to meet him. ‘One day I saw on TV that Shri Munnawar Rana was saying that if PM invites us, we’ll go and tell him about our concerns, so I immediately called my secretary and asked him to invite Shri Rana at his convenience but till date no one has come. As a PM, I can’t go beyond this. Home Minister Rajnath Singhji has publicly extended the invitation, twice, but no one has responded.’

I wrote another blog which again went immensely viral. With this blog on ‘Intellectual Mafia’, I went for a frontal attack and discovered an audience for my voice.

That day I saw the change with my own eyes. The MAMI organizers’ agenda wasn’t to promote these films anymore but to promote themselves. MAMI is just another club of the elites.

I have to be a risk-taker and just tell the truth the way it is. Everything that bothers me. Everything that must be told. Fearlessly. My loyalty is to the inner vision. There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done.

But as soon as you enter a university, we witness a radical and communal face of Communism. Here, they propagate the weaknesses and evils of Hindu culture. They manipulate and twist ancient books to misrepresent them and provoke students. For example, they use Tulsidas' chaupai, without mentioning the rest of the Ramcharitmanas, which is the real context. "ढोल गंवार शूद्र पशु नारी, सकल ताडना के अधिकारी." Dhol ganvar shudra pashu nari, sakal tadana ke adhikari. The above lines are spoken by the Sea Deity Samudra to Ram. When Lord Ram got angry and took out his weapon in order to evaporate the whole sea, the deity appeared and said the above lines in the context of boundaries that are created by God himself in order to hold his creations. What Leftists do is that they very cleverly translate it literally in Hindi, ignoring the fact that Ramcharitmanas is written in Awadhi and the same word means one thing in Hindi and another in Awadhi. While the literal meaning of the line in Hindi is 'Drums, the illiterate, lower caste, animals and women deserve a beating to straighten up and get the acts together', its real meaning in Awadhi is different. In Awadhi, tadna means to take care, to protect. Whereas, in Hindi, the same word means punishment, torture, oppression. Samudra meant that like drums, the illiterate, Shudra, animals and women need special care and need to be protected in the boundary of a social safety net. In the same way, the sea also needs to reside within the boundaries created by God. And hence, Samudra gave the suggestion to create the iconic Ram Setu. Here, Shudra doesn't mean lower caste or today's Dalit. It meant people employed in cottage industries. I remember there is a book by R.C. Dutta, Economic Interpretation of History, in which he has said that when the Indian economy was based on the principles of Varna, handicrafts accounted for over twenty-five percent of the economy. Artisans and labour who were involved in the handicraft business were called 'Shudra'. If there was so much caste-based discrimination, why would Brahmins use their produce? Both Dutta and Dadabhai Naoroji have written that the terminology of 'caste discrimination' was used by the British to divide Indian society on those lines. Manish continues, Like the British, they provoke young students to believe that Hindu scriptures are against Dalits and women and want them to suffer torture. Young students are emotional and passionate. They come here with the dream of changing the world. The concept of "revolution" attracts them and they get swayed by an illogical logic.

It is 6 AM and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations. It is as it must be. I have reached a point where the film can beat about the bush or become explosive by exposing the skeletons that have been meticulously hidden from the public eye by the ‘ecosystem’.