NDTV forcing the withdrawal of Chyetanya Kunte’s blog post “Shoddy Journalism” (see http://bit.ly/hMsH, http://bit.ly/yS2G and http://bit.ly/4ZgS) was a hot topic of discussion this morning on Twitter. nb42 replied to one of my tweets with the following:

Stupid coverage: Rs 50k

Lawsuit to shut a blogger up: Rs 1L

Fancy lawyers to accomplish the settlement: Rs 3L

The fact that the irony of it all is lost on NDTV: Priceless

There are some things in life that money can’t buy. Freedom of Speech, sadly, seems to not be one of them.

Quote from the movie ‘The American President‘:

America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can’t just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the “land of the free”.

If you’re not an American, replace ‘America’ with whatever country you belong to (or live in) and read the above quote again.

Tolerance, then, is a corner stone of a free country. Sadly, we seem to be sorely lacking that quality here in India.