An Unquiet Mind

Thanks to Expat Yank, I dis­cov­ered the Streisand Effect proven in action again. This time, it’s in the case of Tintin:

Sales of a Tintin comic book have rock­eted by 3,800 per cent after Britain’s equal­ity watch­dog claimed that it depicted “hideous racial prejudice”.    

The Com­mis­sion for Racial Equal­ity (CRE) con­demned Tintin In The Congo for mak­ing black peo­ple “look like mon­keys and talk like imbe­ciles” and called for it to be taken off the shelves.

But its inter­ven­tion seems only to have increased the pop­u­lar­ity of the con­tro­ver­sial book about the boy reporter, as by last night it had reached num­ber eight on Amazon’s most pop­u­lar books list.

The Inter­net retailer said Tintin In The Congo had “jumped” into the top 10 since the CRE’s com­ments, which fol­lowed a com­plaint by a mem­ber of the public.

These days, I sus­pect Indian celebri­ties are using the Streisand Effect to their advan­tage by cre­at­ing con­tro­versy around them­selves and thus stay­ing in the lime­light. Now are these reg­u­la­tory moral brigades and cen­sor­ship bod­ies going to get wise? Or do they need to do the same for the same reasons?

Related posts:

1. Orkut anti-Shiv Sena com­mu­nity flour­ishes after recent Sena violence