Chandra Mohan was freed today.. ..but

At 3:pm today, police have arrested and carted away two bus loads of students and artists mostly students from MSU and some artists/activists from Bombay.

Several present have been verbally threatened and pushed around.

There is a 100 strong crowd of right wing supporters who have not been arrested.

Zigzackly posted that update yesterday. And others have also been writing about the issue and the protests – churumuri asks:

1) What if moles start leaking to tilak-toting goons what is being written, spoken and drawn by students and teachers in classrooms, seminars, and examinations?

2) What if self-appointed tilak-toting, trishul-weilding goons start going around schools, colleges and universities driving the fear of god—their notion of god—into our skulls?

3) What if students and teachers especially those in the arts—painters, poets, singers—start “learning” lessons from Chandramohan’s case and start self-censoring themselves?

And Ajay Noronha who’d ‘got up, stood up’, says:

yes, we were reminded that this is not just about chandramohan, n so we must keep the fight on…but really, i wished more people landed up, i wished it din’t have to be just jehangir…wished they didn’t sing “hum hongey kaamayaab” to ruin a perfectly good evening of protest.

Dilip posts the views of Ranjit Hoskote, art critic, and Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, an alumnus and former teacher of MSU. Hoskote says:

In a silent protest against the brutality with which their fellow student has been treated for exhibiting works that BJP and VHP activists claim are offensive and obscene, the students put up pictures of the Gudimallam Shiva, perhaps the earliest known Shiva image, which combines the lingam with an anthropomorphic form; a Kushan mukha-linga or masked lingam; Lajja-gouris from Ellora and Orissa, resplendent in their fecund nakedness; erotic statuary from Modhera, Konark and Khajuraho; as well as Raga-mala paintings from Rajasthan. All these images, among the finest produced through the centuries in the subcontinent, celebrate the sensuous and the passionate dimensions of existence – which, in the Hindu world-view, are inseparably twinned with the austere and the contemplative.

And Space Bar, who had also been at a protest, discusses what needs to be done, in the ‘long-term’:

But those who take offence easily would die before they admit that these events give them nourishment. What would happen in a world where nothing and nobody slapped their delicate sensibilities awake? I suspect it gives them a sense of involvement that is as false as it is exciting. What we need to do is dull those sensibilities and provide them with an excess of offending material so that ennui is inevitable.