This is why I was very relieved to hear that the Board had insisted on a few cuts to make Oppenheimer more palatable to delicate Indian sensibilities. I was informed by those living abroad that there were a few scenes of graphic nudity, and I began to panic because I worried about what young Indian men and women would do if faced with the prospect of a nude actor or actress on screen. Everyone knows how averse we are to nudity, unless it is pornography, of which we are supposedly among the world’s top ten consuming countries.

I was worried about what could happen if innocent moviegoers watching Oppenheimer were to stumble upon a nude scene. Would it brainwash them and prompt them to start wearing less clothing? Would it make them more comfortable with their natural bodies and traumatise the rest of us by displaying more flesh? Would there be riots in movie theatres and hordes of scantily clad folk on the street? These possibilities were too much to bear. Luckily, I’m told the Board either cut out all those frightening scenes or used advanced technology to tastefully add clothing where necessary. When these scenes were compared on social media later, almost no one could tell that cuts had been made. I’m pretty sure Christopher Nolan could learn a few things about editing from the Board too.

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What most of us fail to acknowledge is just how difficult the Board’s job is, and how its members must spend so many hours of their day trying to figure out if a stray nipple or cuss word may cause immeasurable damage to our fragile society. 

They bear the brunt of all this sex and violence so we don’t have to, and their role should be applauded instead of vilified. Yes, it may make us seem like a nation of prudish adolescents in the eyes of the wider world, but that is a small price to pay if it means protecting our adult men and women from looking at other adult men and women without clothing. The fact that we don’t have much sex in this country is testament to how innocent we really are, and it is only because of organisations like the Censor Board that we can preserve this state of innocence. If we became the world’s most populous nation in 2023, sex had nothing to do with it.

Critics have long railed against what they refer to as our country’s regressive attitude and penchant for moral policing. They say we are living in 2023, not 1823, and that adults should have the right to see what they want without government interference. What they fail to understand is that we don’t have a problem with nudity; we only have a problem with nudity if it’s in a movie. This is why members of our ruling party spoke out against Oppenheimer but were silent when Indian women in Manipur were stripped and paraded in public.

When he isn’t ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.