Open Letter to Quint Neon on the “Aunty ki Ghanty” Topic

It’s okay to express your personal feelings, though it is something completely different when you do that from the perspective of a media / news company.

Your personal feelings about the lyrics of a song is of no interest to me or the fans of Omprakash Mishra, the self-made star who became an overnight sensation.

Then you came along, I didn’t know who you were, I still don’t but I read somewhere that Quint Neon took “Aunty Ki Ghanty” off YouTube — At that very instance I knew what was going on, the words “Sexism” came into the play as well, and it was clearer than crystal.

My first thought was “Feminist!”. Yes, your reputation as a feminist is unknown to me, you do not seem to be an activist which I thought you were but upon surfing through your website and Facebook page it was apparent that you were are clickbait news article people. I mean no offence, we are in a democratic country and posting clickbait content is still legal the last time I checked so I am not going to throw at you my personal feelings about clickbaits because you don’t have to care about that, what you are doing is lawful.

See that? I respected your line of work, you are a feminist, that doesn’t bother me either, being a feminist is not illegal and in no way you are depriving me of my constitutional rights. I hate clickbaits, but have I reported you yet? No. Because you didn’t violate my rights, neither did you violate any policy of the social media sites.

Till now this letter seems to be what I feel about you and clickbaits, but let’s come to the point. You, a public media company (public in a sense that you are open for the public), issued a request to all your viewers to report Omprakash Mishra’s song “Aunty Ki Ghanty” so that it can be taken down — all for one reason that your personal feelings were hurt and that your opinion about that song was that it is sexist.

We get it, you are free to have any opinions, I don’t even mean to violate your rights to do so, there are many people in India, way lot many, and many cultures, many societies, all of them different than one another. Oh but we do not have to go into that much detail .

Simplifying things down — I don’t like rap, I don’t like rock, I don’t like Bollywood songs either, let alone Omprakash Mishra’s song. I hate it to be honest, it is fun to hear it and make fun of it and more than that it is nothing that I would like to listen to. Still, my subjective feelings about that song doesn’t give me any right to me to suppress his freedom of speech or his freedom to exercise his rights in general, what anyways gave you the right to publicly issue a request to people to report his song.

Neither legally nor morally you have the rights to shut him down and keep him from doing his job. Your personal feelings doesn’t trump his rights.

Even if you were an activist this would have been a stupid step. The fact that you are not boils to down to one fact that you wanted to prove something, maybe you wanted attention, maybe you wanted to become an activist or maybe you were really hurt by the song, you could have done a few things that were better and would have presented you as a person / organization with some integrity to the public (these are just suggestions, in no way instructions)

• You could have done private requests to people to report his video.
• Asked Mr Mishra personally to take the video down because it hurt your feelings. Do note that he has no obligation to obey you just like you have on obligation to obey me.
• If you felt that the song was sexist then you could have talked to a lawyer and further investigated what can be done to take legal actions against him if there is any law getting one’s subjective feelings hurt by a song. Otherwise bad luck. You can do nothing.

Asking for favor from the public is not illegal. In your case it is just wrong. Just like sexism (on top of that verbal sexism) isn’t illegal and is just morally wrong, you trying to suppress his freedom of speech and keeping him from practicing his rights is both morally wrong and illegal.

You called him a “harasser”, who did he harass? You felt harassed by listening to his songs you can simply stop listening to it. Harassment is a criminal offence, and if he really was a harasser you would have file a complaint against him by now but you did not because you know the law can’t help you because he never harassed anyone. YES. HE NEVER DID. Stop calling people names that can make them look bad.

Whatever the lyrics are and whatever you have interpreted it as no one cares. Even if you did the same to big labels no one would have cared either. Probably you should understand that if you went on to complaint about all these “dirty” songs in our film industry and say all of them were taken down by the judicial system and the Govt. India will soon become a poor poor poor country — A large percentage of revenues comes from these films and songs, same as cigarettes, even when you know it is deadly and you still smoke and the Govt. allows it to be manufactured, it is still allowed because god damn the people, revenue is more important than the lives or ethics of people promoting these. But clickbaits don’t earn any significant amount of revenue, so the first thing to be banned will be clickbaits.

You had Mr. Mishra’s song not taken down forever, it was down only for a review before being actually taken down. Now it is back. How do you feel about your fail? Learn something new?

Please do exercise your rights, and believe me I will be there to stand up for it whenever I can, but don’t suppress others rights just because you think you can. That’s not only illegal but also morally wrong.

Thanks.