Justifying the title of his new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, the author Philip Pullman rams into the “ban wagon”:
“No one has the right to live without being shocked.
“No one has the right to spend their lives without being offended.
“Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. If they have to open it and read it, they don’t have to like it. And if you read it and dislike it, you don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book, you can do all those things but there your rights stop.
“No one has the right to stop the writing of this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, sold or bought or read.”
Link via T.A. Abhinandan/ Nanopolitan
Tags: Churumuri, Philip Pullman, Sans Serif, The Good Man Christ and the Scoundrel Christ
12 April 2010 at 8:05 pm
This applies as rightly captioned to all the loonies on all sides including the so called radical left liberal ones.
13 April 2010 at 6:20 am
Great! What a statement. Will we Indians learn from this statement and accept publications and opinion? Will this day come?
13 April 2010 at 7:56 am
Hahaha! Makes sense to me. But two very simple questions to Churumuri on this. Does Churumuri agree with what Philip Pullman says in the video? If yes, does Churumuri agree that the same applies/applied to “Avarana” as well?
13 April 2010 at 9:41 am
When is this book going to be banned in India? It is not a question of if but when.
13 April 2010 at 9:07 pm
A magazine editor claimed (in)famously that he was the first person in India to demand a ban on Satanic Verses. This editor’s name is Vinod Mehta.
15 April 2010 at 2:45 pm
Well said
16 April 2010 at 6:12 am
Wonderful. I love it when I see that there is, in fact, some intelligence in the world.
Why do people insist on banning literature because they feel offended by satires of religion? Why do they have to get ‘offended’ by the very existence in a bookstore of a book they are not compelled to read if they don’t wish to? Why do they feel the need to negate the very existence of said book by banning, burning, trashing, destroying?
It reminds me a lot of this incident:
Sometimes humanity makes me despair.
p.s. Philip Pullman is underrated – the “His Dark Materials” trilogy definitely ranks up there with Harry Potter in the genre of teen and pre-teen fantasy. Remember many a night cooped up with the books
16 April 2010 at 12:02 pm
>This editor’s name is Vinod Mehta.
Vinod Mehta is a Leftist ideologist, who was dead against the nuclear bill, is always on the wrong side of the majority public opinion.