What has a 19th-century Russian classic got to do with the iconic ‘Plastics’ from Tina Fey’s masterpiece Mean Girls, you ask? (For the uninitiated, in the 2004 classic, “The Plastics sort of dictate the style and behavior, and what’s cool and what’s not, and the dos and the don’ts, and what is right and what is wrong. They dictate the rules of high school which we all must follow to a T.”) And Regina George is their undisputed leader.
We were thinking of Regina George (played by the amazing Rachel McAdams), only because we saw this news report about what a learned judge asked Vernan Gonsalves in the Bhima Koregaon case. According to this report in The Quint, Justice Kotwal asked Gonsalves about the things recovered from his home, “…Why did you (Mr Gonsalves) keep objectionable material such as books like War and Peace, books and CDs at home? You will have to explain this to the court”.
India Today has published an article today explaining that the entire thing was a misunderstanding and that the media had misreported the book in question. The War and Peace found in Mr. Gonsalves’ home apparently was the one by Biswajit Roy-War and Peace in Junglemahal: People, State and Maoists. (Roy’s book hasn’t been banned in India either).
Indian Twitter had some thoughts on this as well:
Who knew ‘Kadhalar Dhinam’ was a seditious movie? From the song என்ன விலை அழகே https://t.co/Ij13uMyNLK #WarAndPeace pic.twitter.com/qOJcCKPB1z
— செந்தில் / Chenthil (@chenthil_nathan) August 29, 2019
The judge should leave his Pride and Prejudice aside, and try use his Sense and Sensibility, and then he’d realise that the matter of reading War and Peace is not about Crime and Punishment, but about Power and Glory, lest his tenure will be a time for Laughter and Forgetting. https://t.co/LUkvxpez5P
— Salil Tripathi سلیل تریپاٹھی સલિલ ત્રિપાઠી (@saliltripathi) August 29, 2019
I wonder why the judge didn’t ask why the man had a book about peace “in another country at your home?”
— Manu Joseph (@manujosephsan) August 29, 2019
Image: Ilya Repin’s Portrait of Leo Tolstoy (1887)
