Cussing and the coolness quotient: Realism? Really?

Coming from the land of the three monkeys, we’ve become experts at the game of shut-your-eyes and for that matter ears as well! That must be the reason we haven’t started worrying over much the blatant invasion in our own living-rooms. A tonne of expletives stream from our screens. We turn a deaf ear to it and a blind eye to the fact that our kids are exposed to it.

And why worry actually, it is after all, cool to cuss, isn’t it? Look at the West! We must have been pretty thick to get it this late in the day. All the mediums, except for the fuddy-duddy still parliamentary newspapers, we have become ‘cool’ with a vengeance. Ask any filmmaker, web-series maker worth his salt today and you’ll learn that the filmmakers pursuing realism till now, from Bimal Roy to Ray to Hrishikesh Mukherji to Benegal to even Hirani just didn’t understand that you can’t be realistic without spouting fifty obscenities per scene. The more offensive the expletives, the more realistic you are.

Hearing offensive language around us isn’t ‘real’ enough, we need our noses rubbed in choicest expletives to understand reality. And nope, it isn’t gratuitous cussing, it is the demand of the story, come on! Imagine how much angrier and bigger (and hence more real and, apparently, more endearing) cussing would have made Big B! His ‘Angry Young Man’ isn’t a patch on the expletive-spewing current web-stars Bajpayee or Saif or whoever, is it? Consider how much more formidable villains like Pran, KN Singh, Amzad Khan and Amrish Puri would have been if they cussed! The poor guys never realized their full potential, did they?

Forget actors, even Spencer K. Kimball didn’t understand the power of the profane. How naïve he was to suggest “Swearing or profanity, is the effort of a feeble brain to express itself forcibly”. It takes sharp intellect to bung in profanities when one can’t think of appropriate words to nail jokes or emotions. Spiderman knew that great power came with great responsibility – what about these film-makers who hold power and yet choose to be irresponsible in what they let loose? What about young, impressionable minds soaking up this normalization of indecency? Aha! they do advice “viewer discretion” and everybody knows how darned tough it is to jump through the loop-holes there.

True, our moms would’ve washed our mouths with Lifebuoy if she had caught us speaking this language but are more evolved, right? Our language slipping in the gutters is the sign of our progressive minds, our cool-quotients. And boy, decency is a small sacrifice in the cause of realism.