Animated, isn?t she?

The problem with Maneka Gandhi getting serious is that we just can?t ever take her statements seriously.

The problem with Maneka Gandhi getting serious is that we just can’t ever take her statements seriously. Ms Gandhi’s initiatives have done a world of good for the welfare of the wild and domesticated animal kingdom. But her getting worked up about the films Rang de Basanti showing humans — horror! — riding horses and Paheli showcasing too many pigeons is, er, making a molehill out of a non-molehill.

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Ms Gandhi has also despaired that a film script depicting a man-eating tiger as a ‘villain’ (it is man-eating) would misguide young minds. So there goes your Tom & Jerry shows, Vicky. Aunty Maneka wants you to know that cats and mice don’t behave in a homicidal manner. And does our heart bleed each time Ms Gandhi cringes at idiomatic phrases like ‘a dog’s life’, ‘flogging a dead horse’ and ‘smelling a rat’ being used? Not really. It’s one thing to teach children — or for that matter, adults — to treat animals with kindness, and quite another to get all tizzy about providing animals with a censor board of their own.

Ms Gandhi should realise that by not firming up her demands with logic — and by treating everything as a sadistic exercise against animals — she does her noble cause no good. And we think it would not be asking too much if, instead of waking them up all too often just to have something to do in life, she let sleeping dogs lie.