The Dance Bar Saga...

The Dance Bar Saga Continues…

My Friend CP Surendran on the Maharashtra government’s banning of dance bars. He has a very lucid and effortless way of expressing his thoughts and feelings. Quoted below is what he has to say published in the Times of India.

“Deputy Chief Minister R R Patil clearly believes that India, in general and Maharashtra in particular need to be saved from bar girls. It was Jews in Germany a while ago. In Maharashtra now, it’s neither Jew nor Gentile, but bar girls.”
It seems the Maharashtra state government has more than a simple ban on its mind. It has offered a commission of 20 per cent for those reporting such bar girls who – like Tarannum who has been arrested living a lavish life and betting on cricket matches – live a decadent life.

CP, as johnwriter calls him, argues that if the youth goes to these bars and become corrupt, it’s the youth that needs to be banned from going to the bars not the bar girls from earning a living.

For those curious enough, yes, johnwriter has been to a dance bar, when his former NRI bosses took him and the staff on a night out to a nightspot in Andheri. Pucca Yankees, they were used to the nightlife of Miami, New York, Amsterdam, Bangkok and the like. So for them it was the usual thing – a night out with the boys.

What johnwriter saw there defies the imagination, at least, to him. The music was too loud and the strobe lights, too flashy. The majority present weren’t young people as Patil alleges. The majority were old lechers on the wrong side of fifty. There was this multi-millionaire from Bangla Desh who had stripped to his churidars and vest and was dancing and throwing money in the air. Some of them got stuck on the ceiling and some landed in johnwriter’s lap. He sheepishly gave these products of some poor third-world exploited man’s sweat and blood – I mean, exploited by those millionaires dancing on the floor with the bar girls - back to the deserving dancers, who were, the exploited ones.

First of all, the music was so loud that even the mafia don with his screechy underworld lingo would have great difficulty in being understood. Therefore “bhai usko taapka do,” would sound something like, “Bhai, usko duspethi do,” which would mean the opposite. The first phrase means, “Don, kill him,” and the second phrase means, “Don give him ten lakh rupees.” See the difference?

So RR-ji you are misguided when you say the youth is being spoilt, and you have sacrificed the wrong goat. You have even cut off a revenue generating income from your already deficit budget.

The prevailing mood in the government seems to be, “Call somebody a dog and hang him or her.” So it is the turn of bar girls now. Who next?

For more about me visit http://www.johnwriter.com