10 February,2009 06:54 AM IST | | Sushumna Kannan
Why doesn't India have an invigorating pub culture? Sushumna Kannan offers her takeu00a0
It was New Year's eve when my friends were in Delhi and it had not been easy for them to find a pub. They could not imagine spending their time in any other place if not in a pub, over a drink. 'Why are there no pubs?' they asked me. 'We take everyone home', I said. They didn't believe me. 'India is a warm country, people don't drink', I said. They still couldn't see how.u00a0u00a0
Public-private divide
A scholar on Asia once told me, 'India is cut off from the rest of the world'. The reason he said that was because there were no pubs in Bangalore, unless one went up north. For all that talk of respecting cultures, very well-meaning and benevolent people found it difficult to understand that there is no pub culture here. They asked, 'So, where do people meet and discuss things? Where do people conduct their intellectual lives if not in coffee houses and pubs? Maybe Indians don't have an intellectual life! Indians, in any case, don't understand the public-private divide!'u00a0u00a0
Another time, a Nigerian friend in his earnestness to conform or maybe sound cool, asked me if I 'went out'. The conversation turned to India and I said I never 'went out' (to pubs, to share a drink) in India. At that, he opened up and shared with me, things about the pressure 'to go out', instead of the traditional ways of being that involved dance and music in very different settings in Africa.u00a0u00a0
Being from south Bangalore, I had little opportunity to go to a pub for many years. But I told myself 'one must know these things, just in case' and went to one some years ago.u00a0u00a0
Nightlife woes
My European friends definitely shared a craze for going out in the night. It almost seemed childish to me an urge to resist a day-night routine that I too had nurtured as a kid. But going out, and to pubs, constituted an important part of the social life of a lot of people. And while in India they were upset that there was no public transport till midnight to bring them back from one. I tried to reason by saying, 'India is poor, millions of us starve, and public transport till midnight would be such a waste of money. People only want to get home as quickly as possible, eat and get to bed'.u00a0u00a0
I cannot forget how an Indian friend who had lived in Europe for many years once said to me in great disapproval that, 'People here have no idea how to live. They stay out late at night on weekends and come in drowsily on Monday mornings and their entire week is one soggy tale because of this, with one thing upsetting the other'.u00a0u00a0
But zoom back on India, and what we saw recently was a markedly different scene.
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Let's keep aside the Ram Sene and the call for 'urging Indians to respect the rule of law'. Both these groups have not exactly understood how to conduct a conversation with each other; they have not put in the intellectual labour required. But what is indeed clear is that there is an 'imagined' modernity' that everybody wants a share in or is responding to. And as scholar Mary E John rightly says, this 'imagined modernity' is more egalitarian than any modernity that is to be found anywhere at all.u00a0u00a0
I surely had not expected to see, when I arrived at the airport of a city in the heart of Europe a couple of years ago, a billboard that literally said, '...is a modern city, Welcome'. They probably forgot to add, 'We have pubs open all nights'.
