Reining carnality! Sanitising Mumbai dance bars is a jolly good idea

Porn is consumed way lot quicker than food. What better example could it be than Zomato, an Indian online food ordering facility, which upped its demand by 2,000 percent when it began to advertise on porn sites? Thank goodness, many Indians have a conservative approach towards porn or else Zomato’s demand might have exploded by 20,000 percent, forcing its clientele to hire a hundred more cooks. Fortunately, we only have a measly 30,000 porn sites available to us, which is nothing but small potatoes.

In contrast, we do have some individuals who do not appreciate the moral policing, like Congress MLA Naba Kshore Das of Odisha, who has been suspended for a week (Sunday included) for watching porn in the legislature. He says his finger slipped on the YouTube button.

Unluckily, he is not in Parliament where a week would have meant he would have no catching up to do.

Against this backdrop, I am so glad that the Maharashtra government has given a new meaning to moral policing by insisting on putting up CCTVs in Mumbai’s dance bars. These cameras will stream live feed into police stations so that everything is on record and our cops can zealously guard our virtue on HD screens. Poor guys, it is a hard life sitting there, going through hours of grinding and twisting footage and we should feel for the ones engaged in this onerous duty.

I believe hours after the announcement, police stations would have been swarmed with requests for a posting at the Save Our People from Porn (SOPP) desk from cops dedicated to keep us squeaky clean. There is also this torrent of requests to be placed on night duty forever and a day.

What could be more comforting than knowing that when someone is hanging out in a dance bar, he is being watched by a gaggle of khakidharis who, obviously, are not interested in the entertainment (perish the thought) but are waiting for him to make a mistake? And there is a lot of scope for that given the strict nature of the standard operating procedure that lesser mortals have to follow while in Mumbai dance bars.

# Rule 1: You cannot climb over the three-foot-high fencing that will surround the floor which will be elevated so much that you might get a crick in the neck while seeking a better view. Take stock of your height and if you are a midget, better stay home and have a cold water shower. The idea of having it (the fence not the midget) electrified has been mooted. If you do touch it, (the only electrifying experience there might be) then you are a ‘Wanted’ man and imagine trying to explain to your wife that you were not in office working late…just trying out some new steps, my petal.

# Rule 2: To make sure that any residue of fun is removed, the customer will have to sit five feet away from where the ‘action’ is behind a red line. If he crosses that line, an alarm will ring in the police headquarters, the SQUAT (as opposed to SWAT) team will be pressed into action carrying semi-automatic weapons and the offending person will be carted off for re-indoctrination. I think this red line had been inspired by the yellow line at airport immigration where you might as well commit hara kiri because dare you step ahead of it that the posse of officials descend upon you en masse.

# Rule 3: It has not yet been cleared but special police teams from the Morality Squad will be posted at dance bars to keep an eye on the conduct of customers who will be permitted to bring their halos with them.

# Rule 4: In a money saving exercise, no currency will be allowed to float onto the dance floor and ‘manna from heaven’ will be a thing of the past. By the same token you cannot shove currency into the costumes the girls are wearing, an utterly pointless rule since you are eight feet away and daunted by a red line, a fence and an elevated floor.

I think this is so good and wholesome a way to have a dance bar, like a chicken patty without any chicken in it. I really do not understand why people would feel upset by these conditions in pure ghee Bharat where 1.2 billion people are alive and nobody has yet had sex. It really scares me that if we learn about sex we might have a population explosion. Which is why anything that titillates irritates.

In fact, the authorities are contemplating other measures to make dance bars more puritan and my suggestion is that we could make the dance girls cover themselves in toto so we won’t know the beautiful one from her ugly sister and also change the music to more chanting type stuff so that we stick to the straight and narrow… damn that fence I just tripped over it.

When the alcohol ban is activated, then a night in the town will be two nimbupanis on ice and the Fosbury Flop over the fence.

But what really amazes me is the amount of research that has gone into this exercise. Take the limit of four girls only on the dance floor at any given time. Who worked out that four is the pristine magic number and if a fifth girl clambered over that fence and onto the floor, it means a bruising of our moral values? Did you know that? No, you did not, so, see how much of an insight you are getting, you ungrateful people, they must have all sat around a horseshoe table and said, Item 3, Section IV, Clause 9 take the minutes please, how many girls on the floor at one time?

And you say the government doesn’t care…working late in the office, my petal.