‘If you don’t like the heat in the kitchen, don’t get in’

Shobhaa De discusses censorship, the media and politics.

LAHORE:

“Lahore is self-indulgent and glorious. Lahore resembles a pampered mistress, while Karachi is the neglected, boring wife”, Indian journalist and novelist Shobhaa De said on Saturday. She was speaking at the session Politically Incorrect, moderated by Sheherbano Taseer on the second day of the Lahore Literary Festival.

De said she had been excited at anticipating a visit to Lahore, which she has already visited twice. “Karachi and Mumbai are like twin cities. It’s all about dhunda, dhunda and more dhunda” said the writer candidly.  “But Lahore is the place where there is so much time. There is time for real stuff like food, love and friendship”, she said.

Taseer asked the price De had had to pay for being politically incorrect. “If you don’t like the heat in the kitchen, don’t get in”, De replied. From facing law suits to being escorted by police in the wake of demonstrations against her opinions, she said she had faced everything. Referring to a recent controversy in India over one of her tweets, De said she had refused to apologise for her opinion. “I said this lady [De] will not back down, do what you want to. There is always a price to pay for being opinionated but I would pay that price again and again”.

Denying her categorisation as a ‘feminist’, she said she believed in speaking for the underdog. “I’d stand up for a man if he was an underdog. It so happens, that in South Asia women are generally the underdog”, she said.

Taseer asked De how she viewed the upcoming elections in India. She said they were the most important elections since independence. She stressed the need for Indian citizens to vote, and said this was no time to sit on the sidelines. She said women were being ignored by some as a major vote bank in the country, something which she said would cost such politicians a lot of votes. She said it was unfair to draw comparisons between Bilalwal Bhutto, whom she referred to as a “babe in the woods” to Rahul Gandhi, who was in his forties and had a lot of political experience.

De said that journalism, an industry she was a part of, had been bought off. She said the compromise in Indian media started some ten years ago. “One has now started to doubt all news”, she added.  Despite this, she maintained, none of her editors had ever asked her to rewrite or censor any of her columns.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 23^rd, 2014.