Censorship is not just a single act of suppression or deletion or erasure.

It lives in many forms, direct and

indirect, overt and covert, manipulating our lives in ways so subtle and so smoothly integrated into our
mindsets, that we do not even realise that we are being manipulated. Censorship, broadly speaking, can
be a kind or pressure built on us to make information conform to the needs of a variety of vested
interests. It would not be an exaggeration to say that we live under a web of censorship the reporter
whose copy is cut, the news agency influenced by the political power or the corporate funding behind it,
the sub-editor playing with headlines that can influence the reader in a way that the original writer did
not intend and that might distort the essence of the message it carries, the reader who reads this and
the editor who knows how to use, misuse and abuse his blue pencil. In other words, the state is not the
only censor. But the state mainly frames the rules and writes down certain guidelines for official, stategenerated censorship based on its own standards of values and moral sensibilities....

Shoma A. Chatterji, film critic, journalist and author, won the National Award (1991) for Best Film Critic
and the Best Film Critic Award from the Bengal Film Journalists Association (1998.) Her book Parama and
Other Outsiders The Cinema of Aparna Sen, won the National Award for the Best Book on Cinema in
2003. She won a research fellowship from the National Film Archive Pune in 2003-2004 and recently
submitted her dissertation for her Senior Research Fellowship from PSBT (Public Service Broadcasting
Trust) Delhi. She won the second prize in the Sahitya Akademis Golden Short Story Translation Contest in
2007. She is awaiting the results of her Ph.D. thesis on Cinema in the History stream. The title of the
thesis isMen Directors Womens Voice. She writes extensively on cinema and gender issues. She also
covers media, human rights, development, child rights and contemporary issues in several print and
electronic media publications across India. She has been on the panel of several Film Juries at
International Film Festivals such as Mannheim-Heidelberg, St. Petersburg, Dona San Sebastian, etc. She
has presented papers on television and cinema at Thessaloniki, Greece, Mannheim, Stuttgart and
University of Heidelberg, Germany, School of Sound, London, and Asian Film Centre, Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Besides contributing to many edited compilations on Indian cinema, she has singly authored 16
published books on cinema, gender issues, short fiction and urban history. She currently contributes
toThe Statesman, The Tribune, Sahara Time, Screen, The Clean India Journal, Bride & Style, Tran World
Features, South Asian Cinema and Film India Worldwide. She has been writing for 30 years and is based
in Kolkata