Ever since Pahlaj Nihalani stepped in as the Chairperson of CBFC, people have called many of the decisions taken by the body ‘orthodox’ and their approach ‘traditional’. His recent demand that he would let the makers use the word ‘intercourse’ in Shah Rukh Khan and Anushka Sharma’s ‘Jab Harry Met Sejal’ only if he gets 1,00,000 votes in favour has been quite a topic of debate recently.
Recently, when Akshaye Khanna was asked his opinion on the same, he said, “Censorship is an outdated concept. I agree 1,000 percent. It is completely unacceptable to a majority of the society today. Especially, the younger generation who are watching everything online — whether it’s the internet, social media — they can access the information from anywhere and nobody can stop them from doing it. So, they aren’t used to this kind of censorship.”
He further asserted, “You can’t necessarily say that certain content can’t be part of an audio-visual or a film or TV. It could be any content and if everyone else in the world can watch it, so can we.” Akshaye’s brother Rahul Khanna recently made a successful American television show debut with ‘The Americans’, in which he had a scene that demanded him to go fully nude. However, due to similar reservations, that scene was chopped off and never made it to the Indian audience.
“If it’s a part of a film that requires that kind of a scene to be shot and you are working with a director who you can trust, I don’t think I will have a problem with it. But it has to be absolutely essential to the story," said Akshaye.
“All of it has to be there for you to make that decision. As an actor, you cannot say, ‘I won’t do this’. You have to be open to ideas of things that you are naturally not comfortable with, but if the role requires you to do something that you may not be physically, mentally or even socially comfortable with, sometimes you can take a risk and just do it,” said the actor before signing off.
On the work front, Akshay will next be seen in the murder mystery ‘Ittefaq’ alongside Sonakshi Sinha and Sidharth Malhotra, which will hit the theatres on 3
rd November.