The CBFC doesn’t seem to have caught up with the Indian lifestyle, at least in terms of ratings. The board still gives the useless ‘U’, ‘UA’ and ‘A’ ratings. Why are they useless?
To my understanding, CBFC’s mission is to categorize movies based on what categories of the Indian society each movie is suitable for. The current rating system suggests that CBFC identifies two categories of Indian society–Children and Adults. Doesn’t it seem narrow to you? Prima facie the categorization looks like a broad classification, but that’s what makes it useless.
Adults might not give a damn about ratings. But parents do. Parents should. It’s their duty to show their children movies that entertain them, may be educate them, but most importantly are appropriate for them. Children grow, rapidly. A three-year old, an eight-year old, a thirteen-year old, and an eighteen-year old all have different mentalities in general, and the themes that are appropriate to them broaden with age.
Themes remind me of something else. Movies should not be rated based on nudity and violence alone. Profanity, sensuality, drug abuse, horror, psychologically intense, and many other parameters apply. Just because two characters kiss, doesn’t mean the movie is Adult. Nor does a movie without nudity and violence imply a ‘U’ rating. CBFC has been especially failing in appropriately rating intense and disturbing films.
‘UA’ is such a gray rating, it doesn’t really mean anything. What should a father of a six-year-old make of it? What about a mother of a thirteen-year-old? Should it mean that these parents should watch every prospective ‘UA’ movie and then decide whether it’s appropriate for their children? Well, then how is CBFC helping here?
The CBFC in their official website state that a ‘UA’ may be highly inappropriate for children below twelve. But who goes to their website and check that out? Why hide that nugget? Wouldn’t it be more useful if it rated a movie as PG-13?
For a country that has very much copied the British system in many ways, I wonder why their censor system hasn’t been. Better late than never.
By a better rating, I mean a clearer rating, that which isn’t disguised to mean something vague. Clarity helps parents decide the appropriateness of a movie for their children. Clarity never hurt anybody.
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[...] by using Puri Jagannath’s Pokiri as the example. I also expressed by concern that the current CBFC ratings of U, U/A, and A are [...]