I understand that marketing yourself as a film-maker involves a certain amount of deviousness. Especially if you happen to be from a nation which after Satyajit Ray has not produced a single long-lasting auteur worth mentioning. But must it be at the price of making your country sound like a tinpot dictatorship whichshoots protesters at sight? It's not just Kapur.

Look at Mira Nair. After making a tacky film like Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, she had the temerity to attack the Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF) for not accepting it untouched in the Indian Panorama section. This when the Panorama rules insist that all entries be cleared by the Central Board of Film Certification. This, according to Ms Nair, was the worst form of censorship -- though the DFF insisted she was welcome to enter her film in the World Panorama section which doesn't require a censor certificate. I agree DFF's rules are somewhat contradictory. But is that enough to take off on your country abroad?

Now I know I'm in imminent danger of sounding like an irate Anupam Kher who counselled Arundhati Roy against criticising India's nuclear policy in The Guardian -- apparently, it was all right if she wrote her End of Imagination in Indian papers alone. But really every time I hear of our film-makers slagging off on India, I am remindedof Nargis standing up in the Rajya Sabha and accusing Satyajit Ray of glorifying poverty. I don't recall Ray calling up his innumerable Western admirers to complain about how he had become an outcast in his home.

Ray managed to be the finest film-maker India has produced without having to conjure up a radical image. I mean I understand when Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige are prevented by the Chinese Government from showing their films at Cannes (as they were last year) because of their ``controversial'' themes. Do our film-makers want such a stamp of official disapproval to help in their marketing? Is it not possible that India can produce artistic dissension? Syncretism, I was told, is our tradition.

So it seems odd when I read Deepa Mehta saying how when she showed her film in India, ``some people were totally outraged by it and some of those men were ready to shoot me''. Now since I had the privilege of being in the audience when the film was screened for the first time in Thiruvananthapuram in 1997, I cansay with complete authority that while there was a buzz of shock at the lesbian angle in the film, there was no danger to Mehta's life.

Not surprisingly, Mehta said this in an interview in the US. It also doesn't stun me when Mehta focuses attention on the controversy inherent in her new film, Earth, which is set in 1947. ``I think it is impossible to tell this story of the period in India's history without being contentious,'' she says. Even if it is, don't expect Mehta to keep quiet about it. Just as when the Brits wanted someone to take on Elizabeth I's Virgin Queen status, they picked on Kapur. I'm sure you'll soon be hearing of dark phone calls to him from royalists.

Of course, I must sympathise with Nair, Mehta and Kapur. It is hard to be noticed when China, Iran and Vietnam are flavours of the month. If you make a film about a man who loves to dress as a woman, as Amol Palekar did with Dayraa, you make it easier to be accepted as an exotic creature in a crowded marketplace. But ifyou're trying to make a contemporary film which will be heard and seen above the din of crashing asteroids, animated ants, and toilet jokes, you need to make iconoclasm a career move.