Outrage over Kolkata restaurant Mocambo clearly shows the great Indian middle-class hypocrisy

Despite being born in Calcutta, and loving everything about Park Street, somehow I have never been to Mocambo. I always preferred Kwality, more so for nostalgia than anything else because that was a childhood haunt even though the quality of their service has dipped beyond acceptable levels. Or Peter Cat, the home of the Chelo Kebab and without a doubt the city’s (nay the country’s) best value-for-money eatery. Well on Monday, Twitter had its usual outrage when Mocambo decided to be a class-conscious prick and denied entry to a driver. Not one to shame away from the obvious class-bias, Mocambo’s reply to subsequent enquiry showed they felt little remorse. They told  Vagabomb:

"The driver was very indecently dressed... Just wearing one pant and shirt, but he was not in proper state. He was having roadside food and just standing, not in proper state of mind. He was not acceptable in our fine dining restaurant. We told her (Dilashi Hemnani) we cannot give her driver a table, but we can give her one. We've such high standard guests coming here, it's a fine dining restaurant, we cannot have such a roadsider coming and sitting here.

We do not have a dress code. But at least a person should be neat and clean. He was having roadside jhalmuri, walking around and grazing people. That is not acceptable. How could you have a roadsider coming in to your restaurant? This is not a dhaba."

 Meanwhile, Mocambo owner Nitin Kothari, also appeared to stand his ground and told Hindustan Times: “We consider Mocambo to be a ‘small’ restaurant that welcomes everybody irrespective of caste, creed, race or profession. We only want our guests to be neat, clean and dressed decent. But in this case the driver accompanying the woman was not wearing a neat and clean dress that would have made other guests uncomfortable.”

That this hit outrage max was evident from the number of people tweeting against Mocambo, downgrading them on Zomato and even royal-blue Kolkatans who have formed part of their loyal clientele planning to boycott them. What’s absolutely fascinating about the outrage is, that some people suddenly seem to have discovered class bias in a country  where ‘us versus them’ bias is a way of life. Bengalis in general pride themselves of being ‘progressive’ being above ‘class or caste’, but the truth is that the bhadrolok is just as parochial as the rest of India. It’s ironic that a nation whose founding father’s life changed after facing discrimination on a South African train for his skin colour would so dearly cling on to discrimination.

We love our segregated groups based on our choices, and that explains why most of us irrespective of our political ideologies, would prefer articulate and anglicised Shashi Tharoor as a dinner guest over the more rustic Kailash Vijayvargiya. It’s not just appearance though, our choice of language also matters a lot, as comedian Kalyan Rath Biswa once hilariously summed up during a comedy act “If you can speak in English, then the chances of your reproduction are very high. If you come out of a Metallica gig and say phenomenal concert, the girl will Raja abhi chalo, jhaadi ki peeche, abhi chalo.”

While Biswa’s statement came in a comic act, jokes tend to mask hard-truths about society that can’t be say out loud. Think of the number of times you’ve laughed at someone for their accent, or mocked their argument on Twitter simply because they didn’t have the same privileged education as yours. Language, clothes, appearance, skin colour, choice of labour, these are all not-so-subtle barriers for people that exist in everyday society, it’s just that we, the privileged, close our eyes to it in our echo chambers. Look at your own house. Why does your maid sit on the ground? Why does she eat in a separate plate? Why does she have a different tumbler to drink water out of?

If you look around, you will see the same bias everywhere time and again, and it goes to the very top. Chetan Bhagat, a man who has often been ridiculed, for his ‘common man’ novels, once said during the height of the intolerance row at an event: 

“Had Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP president Amit Shah and other leaders been to Doon school, had... a foreign English accent, then these privileged class people would not have said anything against them. "There are certainly some problems in the country. But there is no crisis-like situation which may force people to return government awards. I do not approve of this trend. There is complete freedom of speech and expression in India. Nobody has ever asked me to say or not say something. When someone returns an award this way, it gives an opportunity to foreign media to brand us as 'intolerant'.”

 John Lennon was basically speaking about all of us when he wrote: "Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV. And you think you are classless and free."  Lennon’s epic lines from Working Class Hero hit at one uncomfortable truth about most of us. We like to pretend we’re not class conscious, that we’re ‘classless and free’ but we are just fooling ourselves.

Bhagat’s assessment honestly isn’t far off, when I see so many of my colleagues giggle at Modi’s rustic English accent, or mock his behaviour . You’d never see the same reaction against a Rajiv or Indira. You can bet that for many of them, the idea of a man who doesn’t speak English in an Oxbridge accent being the PM of the country is hard to digest, and that’s because we’ve been brought up to judge people on a number of characteristics and the Mocambo incident is just a more public manifestation of our biases.  Perhaps we ought to thank Mocambo for shining a mirror on our privileged selves.