The following (for want of a better word) 'facts' I present to you, from an evening of watching Arnab Goswami scream at strangers from my living room, a few random articles on Google, and that lovely little thing that some of us are blessed to be born with, common sense.
First, there was a poem.
Then there was an invasion.
There may or may not have been a queen.
Then there was an invasion.
There may or may not have been a queen.
Centuries later, there was a movie.
And now, there is chaos.
Let us consider, for a minute, that a queen did not exist. Then the whole thing becomes pointless. So, the responsible thing would be to assume that there was.
Let us assume there was a queen. Now, any lady who is willing to sacrifice herself to protect her honour, I have endless respect for. What I don't understand is making threats to another woman's honour in the guise of protecting the honour of a woman who does not need your puny little stamp of approval for the sacrifice she made, the sacrifice she chose to make.
But this is where mixed feelings get the better of me. If this, as some articles supposed, was the beginning of sati in India, then there is a whole other angle in which to see the situation. The action of a desperate (courageous, nonetheless, but desperate) woman was upheld by society so much, that we forced girls to do exactly what the queen died to prevent. The whole thing is at cross-purposes to its own origins.
So what happens now? Let us behave like the civilised people we think we are, and not spread ugliness in a world that already has too much of it.
It is, after all, a movie. Watch it if you want, don't watch it if you don't.
If you want to protest; by all means, do so, but do it in a way that would make the very queen you are defending proud of you.