Mangalore Manchurian

Any effort to end pub culture will be to China’s advantage, says a letter to the premier.

Dear Chinese Premier,
Last time somebody wrote a letter to you, it was discussed across the world and got us Indians to reflect on our social anomalies. Yes, Aravinda Adiga’s The White Tiger, crafted as a letter to you, made history.

I am now writing to you about India’s Silicon Valley(s) which, of course, you are keen on aping. Bangalore and its sister towns, Mysore and Mangalore, are facing the heat. Their culture software — social mores — has developed bugs and hard-disks are crashing.

The viruses have been identified as vigilantes, who are keen on attacking social peripherals, the pubs that Mangalore’s and Bangalore’s new lifestyles frequent. These vigilantes want to rewrite pub code and make froth macho (something that adult males drink and adult females don’t).

A techie friend calls the state of affairs Kalyug 2.0. He doesn’t know why all this is happening. After all, he downloaded puberty in a call centre, and through hard work, matured into a codie. His religion: work-work-and-unwind. Now, vigilantes are telling him that’s all wrong. They are issuing an advisory: “You can, she can’t.”

Fun is already being fettered; beer taps shut at 11pm. Now, pubs could soon become singles bars, where men joke, brawl and flirt with monotony.

A blog by another techie, addressed to his colleagues, indicates the depth of codie angst. “Are you a vigilante? Have you, partly or wholly, covertly or overtly, impulsively or reactively, been taking the law into your own hands? Are you a culture-control freak? Have you turned your home into a morality play? Do you preach what you practise?”

Perhaps the blog is also addressed to Bangalore’s fathers, husbands and boyfriends. It is about the moral code(s) they impose on their daughters, wives, and girlfriends. The blog ends just there, abruptly. Perhaps, in the middle of a downturn, the blogger doesn’t want morality to be the cause of his sacking.

These days, most philosophical discussions happen in pubs. Office spouses become sounding boards, trainees question their boss’s values, and office gossip is deconstructed into human relationships. Here’s how a group of people reacted to the depubbing of Bangalore and Mangalore.

Ms T: “Why don’t they stop men from drinking? After they are high, all they do is misbehave with women?”

Mr V: “We must see the pub fracas as the revenge of the middle class. After all, India’s Silicon Valley has been largely dominated by two lifestyles….”

Ms C: “It’s the clash of the samskaras…And I have been born without any. My samskaras are SOPs….”

Mr D: “It’s political. Are pubs vote-banks? Are IT workers vote-banks? Let’s accept it: politics’ survival hinges on catering to the traditionalist and waking up the fundamentalist in him.”

Ms G: “But somewhere, it’s the traditional family asserting itself. As GenNext, we have questioned tradition, marriage, everything.”

Ms C: “I wonder whether unemployment is venting its anger by attacking leisure….”
So, did you catch the drift and the draught of the conversation, Mr Premier? You must be enjoying it. All this will certainly give China reason to rejoice and reinvent. Surely, IT needs a lifestyle; prosperity needs leisure; modernity spawns relationships; urbanization creates vaccuum. And, in the absence of parks, libraries, arts centres, culture shows, educational institutes — which the state must relentlessly invest in as cities grow — froth becomes the prevailing fun-do.

In Bangalore, the totem pole of time-pass — a word we use to describe leisure — is the beer barrel. It gives you a high when you see steel casks and kegs unloaded in the morning, making their way to your favourite pub. The smell of froth is as heady as printer’s ink. It is the city’s ultimate tribute to the programmer. 

Well, I have given you the background of the pub brawl being played out in newspapers and telly channels. Moral policing is back in fashion; it is being reborn as e-vigilantism.
You can deface, kill, morph characters on the web. That brings me to a question that you might love to answer. In the era of the vigilante, should the government have a Minister for Vigilantism? He could supervise, manage and control this growing urban phenomenon by beefing up the law-enforcing machinery. He could address the problem at the grassroots by redefining culture in classrooms, and even showing the transformation of Hollywood’s most popular vigilante, Clint Eastwood, from Dirty Harry to Diluted Harry, in his latest flick Gran Torino.

I want to end this conversation with a quote from the world’s sexiest actress, Zhang Ziyi, which I picked from imdb.com. “For western women, it’s much easier to be yourself. If you want to do something, you just go and do it. In an Asian context, women are still much more modest and conservative. I want, through my roles, to express the parts in the hearts of Chinese women that they feel unable to let out.”
Maybe, vigilantism has found its answer. Maybe.
Your Indian friend