Column

For someone who grew up in the Woodstock era, in an age where Dylan, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and the Beatles gave us our anthems to live by, where it was OK to drop out and light up, the recent news of the police arrest of Pune ravers is a matter of concern.

Is there anyone else out there who believes like me that the police were a tad heavy-handed in their handling of the Pune ravers? Or that while there are many among us who may support the ban on marijuana, in this case, since not all those arrested had been proven to have consumed it, their arrest is unjustified?

Drugs in this country are illegal, and we all know they are bad for health. What I want to question is the knee-jerk arithmetic sum that keeps getting repeated every time an instance of youth expression rears its long-tressed head: young person plus trance/rock music equals drugs multiplied by orgies.

I have been to raves in my time, and I have lived to tell the tale. What I have experienced at these affairs is that, though there may have been drugs passed around, they are not the centerpiece of the experience, and certainly not more than what are consumed in a South Mumbai lounge bar.

As for orgies, anyone who can perform an act of sex while their ear drums are being blasted away by the boom boom of the music, and the double whammy of the alleged drugs that are being supposedly passed around, deserves nothing less than a Padma Bhushan.

So: remove the bogey of (alleged) drugs and (non-existent) sex from your friendly neighborhood rave and what are you left with? A throbbing, pulsating aggregate of people no more or less than your collection of dandiya rasis in Dadar.

Do, then, these hapless ravers deserve to be locked up in jails, hounded by the media, and ticked off by the authorities? Most of them were call centre employees and airline staff, professions that are not only among the most demanding but also exact from their employees extremely responsible behaviour.

Does what they do to unwind, let off steam or make it through the night really become an issue that the State should interfere in?

Two other issues rankle in this whole Pune rave fall out. The first is of course what every one knows: had there been present amongst the ravers a son of an industrialist or the brother of a minister, perhaps the action on the part of the police would have been less strident.

We live in the age of the personal phone call at night, and the hapless youngsters arrested during the rave were unfortunate to not have someone to make that personal phone call at night on their behalf.

The other of course is this: the moral grandstanding, the fake shock-horror smacks of the worst kind of middle-class hypocrisy.

It is the revenge of the lower middle class against the slightly more elevated members of its own society.

Also, most of the so-called libertines of my age — the scion of the leading business house who attended his first board meeting and said “Peace, Man” as his opening gambit, the spaced out interior decorator who now runs a cutting edge animation studio, the beat poet who is one of the most sought after jingle composers — have all landed on their feet!

So each time I hear about youngsters being subjected to a kill-joy clamping down I feel saddened that they are being caught in the wrong arithmetic sum: young person plus private recreation equals moral policing multiplied by unreasonable measures!

I come from a generation that believed that youth is a time to be exposed to the widest range of experiences, and that what does not kill you makes you stronger. But hey, I grew up in the seventies. What would I know?

Email: s_malavika@dnaindia.net