media and censorship

'Renowned historian Ramchandra Guha on Saturday said he believes that the government at the Centre led by Narendra Modi is the most "anti-intellectual" the country ever had and is manifested in the appointments it had made in various educational and cultural institutions.

;Forget cuss words, now even the images of Indian goddesses have failed to make the cut in front of the Indian censor board. In the soon-to-be-released film Angry Indian Goddesses, amongst the 17 cuts that the Indian censor board wanted filmmakers to make, was the blurring of the images of two Indian goddesses -- a picture of Lakshmi in the credits, and later in the movie, a picture of Kali. Movie producer Gaurav Dhingra said that he had failed to make the cut in front of the revising committee.

'V.P. Rajeena, a journalist based in Kozhikode, has become the target of organised online abuse, after she shared her personal experiences of studying in a madrasa in her younger days. Facebook closed down her profile on Wednesday after mass reporting by her detractors. On Sunday, Rajeena put up a post in the social network on alleged instances of immoral conduct of madrasa instructors, which she claimed to have witnessed. The post touched a raw nerve and set off a torrent of abuses and open threats on her Facebook page and in her message box.

'A controversy erupted at the Jawahar Kala Kendra (JKK) in Jaipur and two artists were detained by the police, on Saturday, over exhibiting a plastic cow which was tied to a balloon and was floating at a height of 50 feet from the ground. Half an hour after the plastic cow installation was displayed during the Third Jaipur Art Summit at JKK, some right-wing groups and NGOs reached the spot and asked the organisers to dismantle the art work made by artist Siddharth Kararwal.