That I respond by active engagement may leave you incredulous

As a professional writer, particularly one who concertedly affiliates himself with such an estimable academic institution as King’s College London, there comes responsibility with the public expression of opinion in a liberal democratic society.

It is the ethical responsibility of accurate and fair reporting. In your article, you have been unable to fulfill this requirement, and thus your freedom suffers.

You have not discovered anything about my private spiritual activities, which you exploit as an example for your argument about the general social conservatism of present day India. Surely you must have informed yourself adequately enough of my habits, in order to write a public document, that you are aware of my visits to religious sites varying regularly between those of Christian churches, mosques, and Hindu temples?( I visit the Haji Ali Dargah and the Mount Mary Church with the same frequency as I do the Siddhivinayak Temple ) Your description is not only in error but distasteful by suggesting that my spiritual beliefs have little merit beyond mindless superstition. Again, you force me to respond to this slander. I have a right to private worship in a secular society and I uphold it.

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Again, you force me to respond to this slander. It is tiresome, yet I will not permit your error to pass, for it is your responsibility, not mine, to check your sources and provide a knowledgeable account for the public. It is my responsibility to defend my name, the honour of my family and it is my right to refute public slander. You consider that I merely complain. Note bene: faulted in silence, faulted in speech. But really the truth of the matter is that you are missing the point.

If I choose to fight injustice with words rather than blows, it is because I value more highly than you the freedoms of this very bourgeois liberal democracy, my country. I take the responsibility of its freedoms extremely seriously. I need hardly remind someone of your intellectual refinement that in a democracy, one fights with careful discourse, sane rational argument, credible persuasion. That I have a genuine concern for the quality of public discourse in my country and respond by active engagement may leave you incredulous, but it is a possibility upon which I would appreciate you to reflect at the very least.

If a hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his or her freedom, then it is about time that we all endeavour to be heros, and ones in the real world, not merely abusing the art of film and its heroic characters to compensate for the failings of our own profane existence. Art, when it moves us at all, is there to inspire: to provoke thought, quicken the imagination and give us strength for the living of our own lives.

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Your admonishment that I take it on the chin I happily embrace as the metaphor – not literal – that it deserves to be.

In the real world, Mr Pant, I take it on the chin, and every day. But in the real world, Mr Pant, I don’t just take it on the chin. I give it plenty as well. Either get used to it, or get out of the ring.

- Amitabh Bachchan