The question is what should writers do with that power? If singers shouldn't sing vulgar songs, photographers shouldn't shoot lurid photographs and painters shouldn't draw obscene pictures, should writers write whatever they like? It's not about freedom in terms of right but freedom in terms of responsibility. Should we do everything we are free to do? Are we free to do everything we are able to do?

You can dig your nose, scratch your backside and pick your teeth, to say a few things on the lighter side. You are free to do any or all of them, and none of them is morally wrong or legally prohibited. But would you do them in public? Perhaps not, because you would like to be sensible and conform to the recognised standards of proper behaviour.

Propriety is supposed to be a big thing in life. You don't rant in public or use four-lettered words because these aren't decent behaviours. It's for the same reason, you wouldn't burp or suck your tooth in public, because you don't want others to frown upon your improper conduct.

Then propriety underwent change in time. The world started with roaming bands of naked apemen, passed through the Reformation and the Renaissance, the Age of Reasoning and the Age of Enlightenment to arrive at today's metrosexual men, the horizon expanding along the way to create a more liberal world. It took a number of years to publish Eugene O'Neill's Desire under the Elms and James Joyce's Ulysses without interference. The mind opened slowly to accommodate instincts, which relentlessly pushed at the fringes of imagination.

But the crack of window, which brought in the fresh air of liberal thinking, also brought in the stench of filth. It was in the name of freedom that professional fornicators simulated homosexual rape on the stage in New York's Time Square. The world became awash with dirty movies, books and theaters. The United States struggled to strike a balance between freedom and filth, and adopted the three tests of the "Miller Standard" in 1973. Obscenity is if a work's dominant theme is prurient, if it offends contemporary community standards and lacks in serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Why should a writer write titillating trash? The purpose of writing is to get people to think by giving a jolt to their minds. The writer writes to stimulate the souls of his readers with the tonic of fresh, honest and bold ideas. How does obscenity help, which takes away concentration from the mind and puts it in the flesh?

Still, there are writers who would remind you of your neighbourhood smart aleck. These writers use profanities all the time to get to their point. Ernest Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzerald that he wrote "one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit" and tried "to put the shit in the wastebasket". In so much as writers struggle to flesh out their plots and characters, some of them can be deluded that foul words bring energy to the tip of their pens.

According to William Wordsworth, a writer must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished. The power of writing is most powerful when it creates that taste, which ennobles readers and takes them above the humdrum of life to a new level of realisation and understanding. The writer is like a diver in the sea of profanities, who must go down and come back with the treasures of profound thinking for the readers, instead of taking them down with him.

Invoke the "Miller Standard", obscenity is when writers write nonsensical crap which offends people. This is different from hard-hitting political or social essays, which offend privileged folks, and that difference comes in substance, not in style. You can hurl a few obscenities, if that will help you articulate your thoughts and weave your plot. But if your plot is woven on obscenities alone, if your plot has the flimsy construction of an X-rated flick where the story line is simply an excuse to bring a few bodies together for heady sex, the power of writing is a wasted talent.

The word pornography was derived on the assumption of such waste, which in Greek means "writing about a prostitute". Yet people have written about prostitutes, which weren't pornographic. In Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, Nancy is the archetype of the whore with a golden heart. She risked and lost her life to save Oliver from a life of depravity. In Bengali literature, Saratchandra's Chandramukhi is a dancing girl, who tries to save besotted Devdas from the ruins of his broken heart.

It makes the power of writing a double-edged knife. The writer can elevate his reader, at the same time he can also let him down. It depends on what the writer does with his power. In her latest book, Taslima Nasrin focused on men and women, who were engaged in a musical chair of sleeping with each other. Her words were clean, but theme was dirty. Humayun Azad wrote his book, which reads like a scatological minefield. Perhaps he wished his theme to be clean and courageous, but he used not words to write it.

So, the dominant theme of one book is prurient, with very little political, social, artistic or scientific value. The other book, one could argue, was aimed at political and social awakening but interspersed with prurient overtures. Should the writers have written these books? In the freedom of their rights, they have done what they liked. But in the freedom of their responsibilities, they have stumbled for the same reason adults wouldn't flirt before children.

The writer has power not because he holds a sword in his hand, but a pen, which holds ink that flows to express his thoughts. What he writes is closely tied to what he thinks; his mind and writing are like hand in glove. And he must be sensitive and sensible at once, because unbridled writing, like unbridled tongue, brings disaster.

Larry W. Phillips says in the introduction of his book Ernest Hemingway on Writing that throughout his career as a writer, Ernest Hemingway maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing. It makes sense. If what the writer writes has a reflection on him, then what he speaks might have a reflection on his writing. But that is between the writer and his writing.

What about the readers? They read because they want to learn, not because they want entertainment. And that learning is necessary to put rationality in the animal. Those writers who write to put the animal in the rational must think twice. Because reckless writing is lot like reckless driving. The driver may not be aware, but it hurts those who ride with him.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.