Define irony:

irony
noun {U}

a situation in which something which was intended to have a particular result has the opposite or a very different result

With that in mind, can we consider for a moment the witless morons who have been protesting against the making of the film 'Brick Lane' in some relatively unknown Bangladeshi community in London. The protestors would have you believe that the book upon which the film is based is defamatory towards their community. Their point being that the book uses their actual street name, and is about a Bangladeshi community, and unpleasant things are said and done. The locals claim the author (who is half Bangladeshi herself), portrays Bangladeshis as uneducated and unsophisticated.

For the avoidance of doubt, it should be noted that the book is a work of fiction. I don't know what that says to you, but it tells me that it comes equipped with the time honoured disclaimer of 'all characters and events in this novel are fictitious and any similarity to any real life events or individuals, living or dead, is purely co-incidental'.

So, what the protestors think they are highlighting is the possibility that someone is trying to openly insult them through popular literature, and a film adaptation thereof. In actuality, the only thing they are going to achieve, and in fact are already doing a remarkable job of, is generating a huge amount of free publicity for said book, and making people want to read it. It also gets the freedom of speech/information people on their soap boxes claiming that disrupting filming or in any way trying to censor the contents of the book is an invasion of their human rights. All of this is fairly obvious, and while it may raise a smile, it isn't the point which causes me to define irony for the opening passage of this entry.

The really amusing thing here is that, by protesting against a piece of fiction, the locals have openly stated that something in the book has really hit a nerve. Something a little too close to the truth, and they don't like it. So despite the fact that the book, as far as I'm aware having never read the thing, makes no claim to being a true story, accusations that some of the residents are uneducated and unsophisticated are met with pitchforks and angry demonstrating. The idea being to shut them up so they can get on with their little lives.

Heh.

That their red-faced angry protestations bring the glare of media attention right down on top of them, advertise the very thing they're protesting against and allow funding to flow more freely into its film adaptation, and most likely causes the odd person to pose the question 'are these people uneducated and unsphicated?' brings to the fore the magnificent irony of their actions.

And in answer to the question of whether or not these people are untutored philistines, if they can so easily be duped into giving a national plug to the very thing they want wiped from the map, then yes, they probably are.

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