Opinion: The Cinema Hall Has A Lakshmana Rekha. OTT Needs One Too

It is important that OTT platforms follow the same basic standards we have long applied to films in a cinema hall

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Think of a 13-year-old girl in Indore. Her parents bought her a phone during the lockdown so she could attend online classes. The classes ended long ago. The phone stayed. Most nights, after homework, she puts in her earphones and opens a streaming app. Nobody asks her age.

In a few taps, she can be watching a series full of explicit sex, drug use, or jokes about the gods her grandmother prays to every morning. Her parents are asleep in the next room. They have no idea. I have heard versions of this story from parents in almost every city I travel to. They are worried, and most of them feel helpless.

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When I was growing up, there was one television in the house, and it sat in the living room. We watched together. If something unsuitable came on, an elder reached for the remote, and that was that. Nobody called it censorship. It was simply how families worked. OTT on the phone has taken that away.

Children now watch alone, for hours, content often made for audiences whose lives look nothing like ours. Children absorb what they see again and again. Show a teenager, week after week, that cheating on a spouse is exciting, that religion is for fools, that parents are an embarrassment, and that history can be rewritten for a good plot, and sooner or later it stops looking strange. It starts looking normal. These are the years when a child’s sense of family, respect, and belonging takes shape, and whatever fills those years stays. That is why this cannot wait.

The children on these........

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