[Nesacat]

The banning of books here really makes no sense at all. And the whole situation is made worse by the fact that more than one agency has a hand in the matter and no one knows what anyone else is doing.

For instance all Karen Armstrong's books are banned here now (last month). Before that several were available in many bookstores. Her book on Islam was banned because it featured an angel on the cover. Khalil Gibran's Prophet was banned because of the title. Salman Rushdie's book Midnight's Children just got banned causing a mad scramble in Universities and Colleges that had it on their reading list.

The really daft part of the whole scenario is that stores like Borders and Kinokuniya manage to slip past the censors by NOT bringing their shipments in through the ports. The Customs officials at the ports seem to decode at ramdom what is allowed or not. By some stretch I can understand books being banned on a social or religious ground but to ban books because of their titles is a bit much. Borders and Kinokuniya fly or courier their books in and they pay agents to pick up the books. This of course explains why their books cost a little more.

The country has been independent for close to 50 years and it is the age of the Internet. Seems to be that banning books is becoming increasingly futile when you can probably download it along with just about anything and everything else imaginable. It's never made any sense at all this censorship of books and because I buy so many of mine abroad I never really thought about it until I got involved with Silverfish Books. We had a whole box of Gibran's books confiscated at the port. There are whole warehouses of books stuck at ports. The books are left to literally rot. Seems to me that it's time to stop treating people as if they were likely to hit the streets and riot as soon as they read anything above the level of Enid Blyton and stop banning books.

Among the books currently banned are books of children's bedtime tales, nursery rhymes, Disney, Chick Lit, etc. For the life of me and no matter what angle I looked at it I could not find a reason for most of them being banned. There's a little more about it on the Silverfish site of you like. I am sorry for the long rant but this whole concept of banning the written word really gets to me.