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Film posters incur wrath of women’s panel

BHUBANESWAR: Provocative postures of Fardeen Khan and Esha Deol on posters of the recently-released film, Darling, might be attracting youngsters to theatres, but it has not gone down well with the State Commission for Women (SCW).

Expressing concern over growing ‘visual pollution’, SCW Chairperson Namita Panda, accompanied by a member, Sulochana Mallick, made a surprise visit to the city-based cinema hall, Keshari Talkies, and removed ‘obscene’ posters.

It happened all of a sudden. SCW Chairperson, who was attending a training programme on new domestic violence law, got a complaint from a woman over phone about the posters and decided to check it up immediately.

Chairperson herself removed two or three posters and was also helped by the member. Several girls also joined the SCW team in denouncing display of such provocative posters.

“We were shocked to see the posters. Display of such posers will have a bad impact on minds of teenagers. I called up district magistrate of Khurda and urged him to prepare guidelines to prevent the visual pollution,” Ms. Panda said.

She said the district administration should take the cinema hall owners to the task for “knowingly making obscenity public.” When drawn attention of ‘tasteless’ advertisements on hoardings dotting the capital city, the SCW Chairperson said she had also written to municipality authorities of both Cuttack and Bhubaneswar about it, but nothing had happened.

She said: “The commission will write to Chief Secretary Ajit Kumar Tripathy to enforce existing laws to prevent display of obscene posters. We will also request him to take steps to prepare fresh stringent guidelines to check visual pollution across the State.”

Reacting to the SCW’s complaint, Commissioner of Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation said, “the civic body is only concerned about the size and place of hoarding. There is no provision to check contents of advertisements in our license policy.”

She said if concrete suggestions were submitted to corporation, a system could be put in place for scanning contents of all advertisements before they were placed for public display. “The contents should be checked by a credible organisation.”

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