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KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
By making fun of him you are showing your bald mentality (like Digvijay) . I wont say more couse I dont want to join your group of barking one.
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My reservation, if this is a hindutva movement, why did the CPI support. http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article2076818.ece. Therefore i strongly feel the Hindutva ideology in India is deep rooted and left whomever read the Marx have just misunderstood. and i strongly feel that the left was never for a secular state rather for an ‘Hindu secular’ state.
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Making caricature of a leader who represent lower middle class, a class who doesn’t use internet(not behaved as internet tiger), speak fluent english to express themselves like Anna group, is absurd to me. It really frustrating to this class whom Shabnam Hashami termed ‘goons’ on a tv channel (CNN-IBN). I think you people fomenting ‘hindutva’ instead to give regard to their genuine issue. This class is not intellectual as you to go into your hair-splitting idea of secularism or way of your fight. It is not right way to fight against communal forces.
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Thanks for the funnies on the Baba, espe since the supporters dont have a sense of humour. But not in the mood to see more trivialisation of public figures.
Poor guy thought they wanted to kill him and he was not ready to be a martyr. trying to get away wearing woman’s clothes cant be taken seriously – perfect to script more funnies. he is shown to have failed as a satyagrahi but, in this kalyug, we deserve only such revolutionaries, i guess.
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Shivam,
I have always admired the posts on Kafila for presenting alternate points of view, good and incisive analysis and the healthy debate (mostly) they encourage. Even though not agreeing to many viewpoints posted by the various authors, I credit Kafila with influencing many of my ideas during the past 2 yrs of following this blog.
However, with these videos Kafila has taken things to an all time nadir. I see absolutely no point in making funny caricatures of Baba Ramdev and posting it on Kafila in the manner people post cheap youtube videos on their sites just to get increased traffic. There are ‘n’ number of 3rd rate websites to these kind of jobs. Kafila has always been a site where ideas have been debated without making personal attacks (at least that has been the professed objective, I guess). I, personally don’t agree to most of the things Baba Ramdev claims to represent or stands for. But lets use Kafila to debate the ideas in the manner it was done after Anna Hazare’s fast in April. Today’s article by Shuddha is a case in point.
Regards,
Rajarshi
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I agree with you Rajarshi Roy. i do not agree with Baba Ramdev on many issues, but i would rather debate about it than poke fun at him. this post is just hitting below the belt. It is not at all in the spirit of Kafila the way i have come to understand it.
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Downfall of UPA STARTS – Midnight raid reminds one of EMERGENCY and also shows that the govt is corrupt and afraid of fight against corruption. The PM should have joined with a token protest with Ramdev if the govt was serious.
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We read Kafila, because we want to “run from big media”… and what do we see here? Caricatres that make news channels puppet shows look like a work of art….
What was the point of these videos anyways? And I thought the writers here were opinionated…
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All postmodern freaks, who shout that layman’s art is equally important, gets angry when kafila does post one such.Reason, one canot touch a baba , since scratching anything relgious, is a taboo. you can criticise anybody else in this country.The intention of the crtitics of this post, which ridicule ramdev, is to defend hidutva. lower middleclass birth doesnot make some one necessarily revolutionary.Congress and ramdev are two ends of the same.
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Dear Joe, you are making an unqualified assumption. “The intention of the critics of this post…. is to defend hindutva”. How did you arrive at this conclusion? There are sane people in the world who can criticise, but not necessarily put up with ridicule. It is possible to be against corruption, against UPA, against Ramdev and against stupid ridiculous stuff on a supposedly opinionated news website.
” lower middleclass birth doesnot make some one necessarily revolutionary.” Not liking a ridiculous, in bad taste video doesnt make one a promoter/believer of hindutva.
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I challenge you to portray a popular Muslim or Christian leader similarly. I know your cartel, how it grovels at the feet of mullahs and missionaries. A sanyasin cannot always fight back, or else this is a perfect case for libel
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Dear all,
Thank you for reading Kafila, and we are very glad you keep coming by for discussion and debate. I am not sure though why so many have taken umbrage at the videos. I think the first is hilariously funny, and I think sometimes we are tend to take ourselves too seriously :) I think we need to learn to lighten up and laugh a little on the left, and I here I include myself. Making silly fun of self-righteous public figures is an old and hoary tradition. Sometimes this humour is sharp and pointed, sometimes its just silly. I think silly is ok actually :)
Anyway, we can of course disagree, and thank you for your comments.
regards
Aarti
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I am not a supporter of Baba Ramdev but seeing his caricature, that too on a day when the whole nation is condemning the undemocratic government action against the Baba, is shocking. I believe Kafila is a group of serious people and today I logged in to this site hoping for a meaningful take on the issue. But I was disappointed. I would request the Kafila site moderator to immediately withdraw the caricature.
Shaheen Nazar, Greater Noida
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I agree that at least the first two videos are cheap, the second may not be high brow theatre but is in the good tradition of satire. Just want to clarify the videos haven’t been made by me and have been on YouTube, watched by a few thousand, for some time now. Amongst other things I was surprised to see that there *are* people willing to make Baba Ramdev, and more than a handful such people. Rich and poor, urban middle class and rural peasants, have all been in such thrall of Baba Ramdev hat one had not thought this would be possible. If you don’t like the videos, well, I guess, you don’t like them.
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One more point: the videos above were posted here before the crackdown at Ramlila Maidan took place. I sincerely condemn the undemocratic crackdown and fully support Baba Ramdev’s intention to fast until death.
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Please remove this post. It really is a blot on the face of Kafila..
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If by calling yourself New left you are caricaturing Kafila, it’s fine. But if you consider yourself as “New left,” then I’m shocked that the new left is not that new, because it still believes in censorship. It may be your subjective opinion that this post is a blot on Kafila, and it is my subjective opinion that this comment is a blot on you, because you consider it apt to tell someone what they should *remove* from their blog and while doing so, you don’t even have the courage to write your own name! Wah!
You have the right not to like a post and to express as much but what gives you the right to say that a post should be removed? Who are you?
Perhaps I can consider removing the post if you go on a fast unto death at jantar mantar or Ramlila Maidan with that demand.
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Dear Sir,
Sense of humour and cheap tastes don’t go together. Lower your tastes/standards and your humour vanishes at geometric proportion.
Please try to keep some standards and etics.
-Wing Commander Ravindra Parasnis (Retd)
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Too much debate on caricature is waste of time . better to start a meaningfull debate on the entire episode from satyagarh to crackdown, dharna and fast and the game plan of different political parties.
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