Rithwikipedia

Baba Ramdev wants all the bars in Mumbai to be converted into yoga centres. Just as in the Cola Wars, he is promoting his own franchise by hitting at another.

That is all fine. Negative marketing is not as bothersome as banning. Bans are never a reason to rejoice. They just curb individual rights without serving the actual end. Gujarat, a dry state, has one of the highest consumption of alcohol - which is as it should be! Wink.

No one's forcing me to go to a bar, to drink, or involve with infamous bar dancers. But if I do decide to do the above, out of my own choice, I expect my decision to be respected. Somehow, a far removed group of people taking a moral high ground and deciding what is good for me, is something I am not okay with. But, that's just me. You may prefer dictatorial regimes to run your life for you.

Which is why I cringe when the Baba lauds the efforts of the Deputy CM of Maharashtra for banning dance bars in Mumbai. In fact, banning has probably been the single most unhealthy step for the dancers. I wouldn't be surprised to find a sizeable number of them afflicted by AIDS, by now.

I wonder what Baba has to say about Dr. Shilpa Shetty looting dilwalon ke dil ka karaar while also doing her yoga..


Further reading:
From Dance Bar Girls to Business Escorts.
Prostitution beckons India's former bar girls.
Dignity no bar.
India: Bar Girls Seek Rights.

A couple of hours ago, I just watched half of a NDTV 24x7 talk show on the limitations imposed on nightlife in Bengaluru.

It included the state's Home Minister, the Police Commissioner and a moral-police sort of guy who could very well converse in English and yet kept letting out superfast streams of Kannada righteousness. (It is quite possible that he didn't subscribe to notions of free discussion. And so, insulated himself from the arguments of at least the non-Kannada speaking people in the studio.)

From what I gather, the new rules state, besides others that I may have missed:
a) No dancing where liquor is served.
b) Only recorded music. No live bands.

What great benefits this would bring forth, is beyond me. Not surprisingly, the stipulations are very vague. A nighclub owner asked the commissioner: What if a customer enjoys the music — recorded of course — and starts swaying or shaking a leg? He replied that a bit of dancing at his chair can do no harm. On being asked as to why he can dance at the chair but not when a bit afar, the commissioner didn't have much to say. He just said that a designated dance floor shouldn't be there. Promising a workshop to help the club owners understand the vague laws, he moved on, (amidst much laughter) to claim B'lore as the most liberal city in the world, compared even to London and other metros.

Anyway, one would think that, what people do, in places they go out of choice, would not concern the government, or any other group for that matter. (Unless they do illegal stuff, or harm and nuisance is caused.) I wonder how Bengaluru is feeling right now, being told what is right, by a group of people who have no business in meddling with individual lives and rights.

It turns out that the moral police had also raided a party to demand an end to the festivities. In a not much polite or legit a manner, I presume. Yet the authorities prefer to spend their time policing morals rather than acting on illegal occurrences. Pitiful, no?

Well, till things change keep practising the moves with the curvaceous chairs..

James W. Michaels was one of the senior most journalists in the business. After a US Army stint in the second world war, he set up the New Delhi bureau of United Press Intl. Following which he moved on to Forbes, where he stayed on for 45 years.

He was the first to report on the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. This is ranked among the top 100 greatest news reports of all time. He passed away on the eve of Gandhi Jayanti.

In this interview with Outlook(2001) he spoke on India.

About the growth of India so far, which by what he says, was unexpected for many. -

"...I think most of us who were observing it then thought the country would break up, and that parts of it might revert to some kind of totalitarian rule. But out of that has developed a functioning democracy, a country that has had good economic growth—though not as good as one would have liked—and it takes its place among the leading nations of the world. So that's not bad, considering the inauspicious beginnings."

What is to be noted, though, is what he says about Nehruvian Socialism, which pretty much defined the way our economy behaved until recent times. Only after the 1991 reforms did things even begin to look up.

"...Nehru, though we loved him and admired him at the time, was probably the worst disaster to ever hit India, at least in economic terms. (In India Unbound, by Gurcharan Das), it's said that Nehru was basically a Brahmin snob, and he did not like business people. Instead of the government getting out of the way and letting the market allocate business resources, the government did it. And the result was an incredible waste of resources.The way to fight poverty is not by chopping the pie in smaller pieces but figuring out how to make a bigger pie." [Emphasis mine]

The government still gets in the way and the bigger pie many times never makes it to the oven. Thanks to the regulations.

"...what would've happened if Nehru hadn't been affected with this socialism. Rajagopalachari didn't want the government to get involved (with the economy), he thought the American model was right for India. And Sardar Patel also did not want all this socialism. But south India got marginalised in the early days. So Nehru did whatever he wanted."

After all these years, we still haven't learned enough.