Don’t just rant about rave parties

When cops arrested ravers a few days ago, they trod on an ancient line of lawkeeping. Ravers, along with ranters, have always irritated authorities. Of course, ‘rave’ – from old French ‘raver’ – began to mean “talk enthusiastically about”, from 1704. Thus, those who raved about communism in America were hounded by Joseph McCarthy, 1950 onward. But the modern sense of ‘rave’, meaning a “mass party with loud, fast electronic music and often psychedelic drugs” was first recorded in 1989.

Now linguists know that a practice pre-dates the label eventually given to it. So we can safely conjecture that raves may have been organised in the early eighties. And sociologists will tell you that India’s aficionados of the rich-world’s ‘cool’ practices import them almost immediately after they are created. All this is a long-winded and, I hope, academically hip way of telling you that raves have been wrecking flats and farmhouses in and around Mumbai for years.

Conversations between the swish-set minions at tony parties, and the sizable number of blog entries on the subject, indicate how common it is for some people to willingly lose their minds at some throbbing, remote venues. The drugs apparently enhance one’s capacity to appreciate music. And to think that I, like thousands of members of Mumbai MS Subbalakshmi Appreciation Society, have been held in her thrall with only coffee and medu vada. So square! But at least no one arrested me for trying the Brindavana Saranga raga in the car park after a concert.

Getting back to drugs, no senior cop would be foolhardy enough to assert publicly that all raves that ever happen are busted. It may seem an inane point: after all, it is impossible to solve all crimes ever committed. But the point is that although drug use, like murder and burglary, is severely deprecated in the Indian Penal Code, the former enjoys a frisson of seditious glamour that the latter two do not. Forbidden fruits, the history of our culture will emphatically prove, exert more fascination than the bananas you can pick up from D-Mart. That is why a drug user needs education about the risks of drug use more than moral fulmination from a constable who may have picked him or her up.

Like smoking, drugs need to be taken off the “cool” list. And their debilitating effects need to be highlighted in clinics, in college lectures, in school texts, in films that precede the main bill in cinema theatres. Corporate houses should screen applicants for drugs and refuse to hire users; several rich-world corporations already do that.

Finally, it appears that prodigious tonnage of drugs was discovered in the latest busted rave. Will the police please check how it is so easy to procure drugs?

raghu@dnaindia.net