Name Place Animal Thing

By Mayank Shekhar

Part rant, part reportage. Partly serious and partly funny. Name Place Animal Thing by top film critic Mayank Shekhar is a whacky yet insightful take on desis and popular culture. Covering concerns of a young, urban India, ranging from city, cinema, stardom, and religion to cops, cigarette smoking, social drinking, and social media, each piece has been peppered with Shekhar' s characteristic wit and razor sharp observations to simultaneously inform, amuse, and irritate! If you wish to start a conversation, here' s the book to pick.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fingerprint Publishing
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9788175993556

Book preview

Why being single, male, and Indian is a strange tropical disease.

he guard outside the Gordon House Hotel in Colaba hated my face. I don’t think he’d even seen it, though. The way most of us casually blank out eyes of a beggar knocking on our tinted car windows, this guard had first looked away, then scowled, then mumbled something for a bit—still ignoring the four of us entirely, given that we were even unworthy of his inattention. And then he finally muttered ‘nahin’, or something to the effect.

We were all men, single (so, obviously molesters and rapists), standing outside the main gate of his posh discotheque, dressed in our Saturday night best. It appeared we could afford his hospitality, but he didn’t seem interested. Dogs and stags weren’t allowed, but then, suddenly, we (the dogs) were.

Galloping mindlessly across Mumbai’s backpacking district, we had left behind our only legitimate passports to status and nightlife—the four women friends with us. They caught up with us eventually and hence the guard welcomed us in. I don’t think he said sorry. He needn’t have. I didn’t blame him. Egos are too trivial to get in the way of a precious evening.

However, the gent outside Tito’s, with eight people inside on a Monday night, in the dead of the monsoon season, turned out to be a whole lot ruder. I heard him whisper under his breath some terrible things about the anatomy of our mothers and sisters. Not the sorts to pick a brawl still, we endured the humiliation, gently explained that we, in fact, did have women friends at the bar and then quietly left. This is common sufferance in Delhi. But we were in Goa, for God’s sake.

Being a man, with other men, in India’s semi-urban nocturnal jungle is to remain a gross, sometimes disgraced social outcaste, experiencing a strange tropical ailment—single-itis, for lack of a better name. These untouchables of nightlife don’t deserve their dance, with their drink, even if they could pay twice for the same simple pleasures.

You know something’s warped when watering holes that serve loud hard retro rock for music—still no one’s idea of a romantic date, by the way—remain officially open to couples only. Save if you are a regular. So they let me into Mumbai’s good old Ghetto the other night. I heaved a sigh of relief. We were five men, one woman. You can’t form political coalitions with right permutations each time you go out. The said ratio didn’t work at the next lounge, like it won’t at most clubs. Tough luck, I guess. And, no, there isn’t such a thing as ‘gay couples’. So, smart try.

It’s the sort of sexual discrimination few will take seriously and fewer still will care about. No one I know will fight against it. Suspicions are hard to erase. Some terrorists give all men a bad name. This is true for the average, Indian non-molester man, who makes for the vast majority. He stopped hitting on Indian women at some point. She instantly assumed him to be sleazy anyway. She had probably liked looking at him. He had seemed okay. He had enjoyed giving her the attention. She had thought that was fine as well. Their eyes had just met at the bar. But I know what they were both suffering from.

The Indian girl is hit by the silly ‘slut complex’. She won’t make the semblance of a first move—which should truly be her right—for fear of being judged as the loose one. The Indian guy is similarly down with the ‘creep syndrome’. He can’t be seen as one of those, you know, one of those. He has a reputation to protect.

Given such poor practice with making conversations with the unknown of the opposite gender, his skills get considerably worse with time. When he does try his luck now, once in a while, the possible openers get odder still: You smell really nice . . . Eww. She looks away. He goes back to his drink.

The times you must hang out with other men, just men, is when you’re at a quasi-gay joint celebrating old boys’ reunion of a frustrated boarding school. There are mostly men around at party places, which allow men to be by themselves. The topic of conversation is the woman, still.

Species single, male, and Indian, could consider themselves getting officially quarantined. It would help their cause. Female companionship is a mirage. Male company gets boring. Cloaking this lack of opportunity into a moral virtue, most prefer to get married instead. Their parents help them hook up, finally. Someone should. It’s hard to hold out beyond the late twenties. Arranged marriage isn’t always a matter of social conservatism or personal choice. It is often an urban necessity. Family feels proud. Segregation suits the status quo. Society approves. As does the petty politician, whether he’s the sicko who hassles lovers at public parks, or the old man in the gram panchayat. Unmarried love is fatal to his constituency. Inter-religious or inter-caste family can negate his existence. The conforming institution, the saviour, lives on.

***

Sooner or later, being single gets even tougher when everyone else around is already married. And there, those platonic female passports to an acceptable nightlife are gone as well. It may be fair to suggest that you can be happily single, in much the same way as you can be happily married . . . both being empirically impossible. To me the occasional woes of single men, however, seem diametrically opposite to those of the single women I meet. Except when they discuss the opposite sex, which is when they talk the same language.

Both on separate tables insist that a man or woman who is straight, smart, attractive, intelligent, interesting, funny, and, yet, available is an extinct specimen fit to hang at museums. Maybe because the two tables have never merged with each other’s. They’ve never really met. After school and college, where will they? At work? That’s where many do, it appears—unless you’re the supposedly shy sort, who only slimily stares at objects of desire, over the cubicle, under the staircase, when not stalking on Facebook.

New to sharing workspace with women, the traditional Indian man can barely get himself to open his hesitant mouth before a frothy female form. What comes out, when he does part his lips, bears promise of a sexual harassment case. He’s better off tongue-tied, quietly fantasizing. Dishonesty in sexual expression is probably better for the civilised world.

The less shady ones—fat, fugly, tall, talkative, short, sloppy—get to demonstrate their actual worth at work. This is a level playing field. Women get attracted to the relatively smart. The guy has something to prove. Bosses should be glad. Late hours aren’t a problem. Attendance goes up. Company’s productivity rises.

Sure, an office intern can shake up the White House and shock America. The gorgeous dimwit secretary can make the stern corporate CEO dance on his knees. Attraction demands no prior appointment. This may be unfair on the nerdy, pimply man who must work harder to command the same attention from his male superiors. But nature tends to balance this out in the long run.

That rookie biz-school grad, when he turns bald and old and if he is on top of his boardroom game, will be considered sexually attractive still. This isn’t necessarily true for the dumb hot intern in his office twenty years later. While he’s younger, freer, funnier, he stands a fair chance as well. Call centres and the movie industry merely get a bad name. All Indian offices with reasonable sex ratios, being 1:10, if you peer harder I reckon, will look like rocking dating sites, spiced up with secret romances, rebounds, heartburns, and heartbreaks. Pay closer attention to the HR department.

Mixing hormones with business may be a terrible idea, I know, but what to do? Where else to go? At a house party full of drunks? Where the inevitable cock-blocking and penis-fencing match is about to begin between twenty single men over the only woman who decided to stay back until late? Maybe. Or maybe not.

At a discotheque? Yes. That would be an ideal place for the lonely soul, seeking a happy ending to a day—a night of casual, naughty nirvana. It’s a large, dimly lit psychedelic dome singularly structured around eyeing men and women, since there’s precious little they can see of each other, through their beer goggles, under a shiny disco-ball. Loud music takes away the awkward discomforts of acquaintanceship. Burden of conversation safely lies in the lyrics of the songs. Akon sings ‘I wanna love you’, Snoop Dogg adds ‘I wanna fuck you’. Bodies move to booty calls. Eyes meet. The point’s made. Nobody need ask your place or mine?. Maybe that’s there in the song lyrics as well. Deal’s struck. Booze is expensive. Night’s young. So are you.

But then if you’re single, male, and around others with the same affliction, you were just dreaming right now. They won’t allow you into a nightclub. It’s for couples only. Despite weightier measures of time, the two people entering have already met, and so have already dated, drank, danced, and done all old-world things invented to break the ice since the Internet. Then, perhaps, they’re not single anymore. Social segregation is a vicious circle. Having a girlfriend exponentially increases your chances of finding another than being single ever does.

For a year or so I once co-ran an anonymous daily relationship column in an English daily in Mumbai. It was called Dear Diana, named after this well-travelled woman who could solve your daily problems. I was Diana. It was a popular read. Most of those writing in, I realised, were only checking if we would print their crazy queries, none of which were serious. They were almost all jigsaw puzzles about cousins sleeping with their daughters, who were in turn making love with both the dad and the aunt. The only genuine questions would inevitably be from a lost male soul: I like this girl. What do I do? Become her friend, I’d say. How? Get to know her friends first, and take it slowly from there, I guess. How? You know what, buddy? I don’t know.

A veteran tri-sexual acquaintance (the sort who serially tries for sex as his natural right) tells me he’s had it now. It is a hard life, unless you’re a rock star, or in the Indian context a Bollywood hero who plays a rock star, I suppose. The friend says he’d rather start a political front for single men. There’d be enough support for his cause, he jokes. I don’t agree.

Nobody would openly join a group that automatically is presumed to comprise a bunch of cash-strapped, unstable varieties who walk around being single because, it is thought, they ought to be. No woman could stand the son of a gun, anyway. Even women are attracted more towards men who are already hitched. There’s mystique in the unattainable. Singles’ nights inevitably fail. Recent female responses to dating apps like Tinder suggest to me that it is mainly full of married freakoids or sexual fiends. Neither help much in restoring the rep of the Indian single man anyway. Deserters, all these people, the ‘tri-sexual’ frowns at my analysis. You’d be the first one looking to desert your own group, I tell him. He agrees.

The Game is a celebrated Bible for single men that scientifically tutors an ‘average frustrated chump’ (AFC) to become a ‘pick-up artist’ (PUA) giving out few quick steps towards attracting pretty things at bars, cafés, malls, and discotheques. The bestseller studies various ‘seduction communities’ in the US. During the course of writing his experiences, author Neil Strauss, self-admittedly an AFC, attends workshops conducted by experts in serious ‘seduction communities’ before he gets anointed the world’s no. 1 PUA.

The single Indian man would be in awe of such a champion. Read the book and you’d be easily able to tell why the same methods could never be applied in his country. This isn’t to say I haven’t seen a desi dude with a ‘wing man’ at a local bar, ‘peacocking’ (dressing outrageously), ‘negging’ (sounding rude, but giving backhanded compliments), ‘kinoing’ (making harmless physical contact) . . . Yeah, I have basically seen him make a plum ass of himself in public. The desi girl is mostly unimpressed. She probably also knows he’s read the book.

The Game is yet another American dream. Women have widely panned the bestseller in the West for its overt male chauvinism. The premise is entirely sexist, yes. But sex-guru Strauss makes a significant point out there that should please the average female reader—that there are no ugly women, only lazy ones.

Everybody loves the single woman. The world donates her its affection, attention, drinks, dinner, coffee, couch, conversations, cupcakes, tags, hash-tags, friend requests, re-tweets, roses on Rose Day, proposals on Propose Day, self-respect on Valentine’s Day . . . She gifts them hope. Nobody loves a single man; not even the single man himself, and least of all the bouncer outside the club.

When the molester of the street is the hero of his movies.

love lonely drunks, high on their own selves. It’s much easier to find them at bars in North India, particularly in Delhi’s posh pubs. Delusional on drinks, they also ply you with free alcohol and hilarious exaggerations, if you’re a willing listener—keenly suppressing your snigger, if not adding to their self-image.

"Sirji, Dilli toh aapke pocket mein hai jee, sirji"—that’s how my buddy and I once egged on this lonesome, unknown mid-aged drunk at a nightclub appropriately called My Kind Of Place. Next thing we knew, he’d paid for our booze, was driving us in his car, had dropped us on the way, and handed us a thick wad of cash (because we preferred to take a taxi home still). Yeah, we were in our late teens: over-age delinquent Houlden Coulfields, tickling the belly of Delhi’s rangeen raatein, with no money in our pockets. I don’t recommend this to anyone. It can get dangerous sometimes.

This is just to say that I picked up the habit of overhearing other people’s drunken brags quite early on in life. Uncle Brag usually looks for an audience. If you give him enough of a hint, he starts talking to you. In Bombay, I occasionally find these uncles at premieres of movies, especially one of those low-budget flicks that get funded by shady financiers from all over the country, often in return for the premiere show’s passes alone.

These guests spend a fair portion of the evening, tado-ing (leching), dabao-ing alcohol (getting hammered), and generally bakchod-ing (talking shit) at the smoking lounge. The fellow before me, with a patient chela such people usually carry along on a free ticket for two, was no different. An oldish gentleman from out of town, I figured; he may have been looking for a wider audience. The chela was for keeps, anyway. It didn’t matter what he thought.

He would occasionally fix his one eye on me as he would drop names to his chela with the same swagger that he would pull a puff from his cigarette. He was right. I was listening. I just didn’t wish to engage. He continued: Arre Ram Gopal Varma. Uss din hum milne gaye. Ik dum seat se khada ho gaya saala . . . Yash Chopra bolta hai humko ki picture banane ka paisa nahin hai. Hum bole, itna bada ghar hai. Gaadi hai. Aur paisa nahi hai? (Basically, Ram Gopal Varma got up from his seat when he saw him last, and Yash Chopra, despite owning a bungalow, home, and car, complained to him about the lack of money rather than mom.)

This is 2004, when Varma was a big shot, and Chopra Sr. was still alive, but apparently not doing too well financially. I puffed a few extra drags left of my cigarette, carefully avoiding his one-eye contact.

At some point, he, surrounded by beautifully dressed women, mentioned to his chela that if the premiere night was held in his hometown, guns would have come out. "Bawaal ho jaata, saala" (There would’ve been absolute pandemonium). This is when I couldn’t take it anymore. I finally spoke up. He’d found his audience.

What did an ambience of lovely looking, scantily clad girls minding their own business have to do with a blaze of guns, I asked. Someone would’ve fancied the chick, he said. It could’ve been a VIP like him. The guns would be out. And they’d take her away. Surely, there was a touch of exaggeration in his tone. Or maybe not. Even if he was half-joking, I realised, the only reason he hadn’t raped someone that night was either because it was illegal or because the place was not in his hometown.

He was probably a rapist in his head, anyway—small-town financier-distributor type, I guess, no different from film-makers making movies for his type of audience for years. This is where they have traditionally shown rape as an image for collective titillation—the blouse comes off slowly from the sides to reveal the bare shoulders, and finally the white bra strap. The girl screams. Grizzly Prem Chopra and his minions undraping the sari laugh together in a coy performance for carnal pleasure. For those in the theatre, it probably is. It certainly is on YouTube, which shows up several videos specially titled ‘hottest rape scenes’, an oxymoron available in Indian films, which secure millions of hits on the web as Kanti Shah’s heroine Sapna runs from the pond in a white see-through sari, being chased by hungry dacoits—in front of a salivating male at his home, I suppose, loosening his own pyjamas at the same time.

The fellow indulging in the act is the villain, of course—I mean the person on the screen, not the fellow in front of it. ‘Prem Chopra’ or ‘The-rapist Ranjeet’ obviously can’t be the reasons for rapes in Indian society. They only reflect a mindset.

People know what’s wrong. Only the deranged act upon their worst fancies. Genetic evolution can’t always catch up with changing human norms. Emphasis on education followed by shaming of confirmed offenders might be a decent deterrence. The hero in the film, of course, gets in soon enough, crashing through the glass walls on his motorcycle to save the day. Because? The girl is his sister, or soon to be his girlfriend, and sooner or later his wife, when he claims complete ownership over the heroine’s body and soul. The mother is God. The sister and wife must be protected.

If she were instead hanging out at a nightclub, she’d be the sleazy vamp of the ’60s, the smoking female equivalent of the villain herself. Or the ‘item girl’ of the ’90s, dressed for crowds to make a pass at her, shaking it on the dance-floor stage, making known her real estate status as a free-for-all public property. You can imagine what the drunken creep thinks, molesting young girls coming out of Bombay’s JW Marriott on New Year’s Eve. He knows what goes on inside these supremely debauched urban dens of unholy vices. He realises what kind of girls these are. We know from where he processes this information.

The white-skinned foreigner of his street is also, obviously, the ‘easy bikini’ from his item songs. She’s sometimes heckled, sometimes catcalled, but mostly leched at, all the way till she’s outside the onlookers’ line of vision. Bollywood stars who perform to these same songs achieve all the fame and respect. The small-town girl who might wear clothes inspired by them becomes a whore in everyone’s eyes.

***

At the stroke of the midnight hour of August 14, 2005, the number one track playing at the dance bars of Bombay was ‘Kajra re’ from a popular film Bunty Aur Babli. This is what girls fully draped in shiny saris were moving to, in a manner born of film stars, while the willing public’s beer and bucks flowed around the city’s well-lit dance floors.

The onscreen inspiration for these wonderful dancers was a much less modestly dressed Aishwarya Rai in a plunging neckline, who had set the parameters for the performance—with scores of men, besides Amitabh Bachchan and his son Abhishek, by her side. No one I know had found those clips offensive in a movie that was rated fit for children to watch.

I went from one dance bar to the other that August night, ‘Kajra re’ bleeding through my ears, until we were holed up in a dark, dingy room in the basement, among hundreds of quiet, sweaty patrons, because the cops had raided the bar upstairs. It was morning, and as everyone knew, which was why we were bar-hopping in the first place—dance bars were being made illegal from that day onwards.

They had been around for a couple of decades, providing unique entertainment to a liberal, lonely city. I’d always take both male and female tourist friends to these nightspots. This is where they truly experienced the openness and unique energy of Bombay—hardly at the Gateway of India. Nobody disturbed us. I’d never seen an argument break out, let alone a fight. We would watch the shows, down our beers, and leave by the crack of dawn, because everything else would be shut by then. Dance bars would bring in cash for police and politicians alike. They would possibly have fewer reasons to harass the common man the next morning.

Almost arbitrarily, the state decided this could not carry on any longer. Why? Because the mai baap felt so. It was as simple as that. There was nothing anyone could do about it. Outside of a few stakeholders of those bars, nobody had openly protested against this move either. Nobody does. Who wants to speak up for dance bars, what will everyone else think? A society that lets go of its liberties so easily probably never deserved any in the first place.

Those bars were, apparently, hideouts for criminals. Given that they became illegal, the criminals must have gone severely underground, making it harder to track them then. The official reason given for shutting these bars down was the exploitation of women that went on in there. These girls were deemed immoral by the state. Women’s safety was a concern. They were prostitutes. I know they weren’t, then. They probably became, later.

Of all Indian cities, it’s obvious why Bombay should attract the maximum number of moonlighting showgirls—it is the showbiz capital. Their aspirations or talents could find home in similar if not more risqué jobs as back-up grinders at film item numbers, music videos, Bollywood charity events, and countless award nights. Nobody had banned the Filmfare award. Nobody had ever called for a ban on Bollywood, clearly.

They’d done away with the dance bar, instead, which was built on a pretty simple premise. Psychos are another matter; they need help. But what do most leery men do on Indian streets when they see women walking by? They lech after her until she gets uncomfortable, or hopefully stares them down.

It’s a menace. It can also be a business proposition. There’s an elevated platform lit up usually in primary colours, with a dozen fully clothed dance girls milling around on top of the podium. Most of the girls stand with bodies arched sideways. Some of them move enthusiastically to Bollywood songs, especially if they’ve established eye contact with someone who’s likely to shell out cash to watch them dance.

You aren’t allowed to touch these Bharatiya narees in wedding saris. There are enough bouncers. The women, like in a discotheque, are safer than they have ever been on the street. The owners are usually connected to the cops as well, or at least they pay their weekly dues. You can chat these girls up, charm them if you must. This is something patrons in the West harmlessly do at regular bars and nightclubs, anyway. More importantly, dance bars are not strip clubs. They couldn’t be. The girls are meant to make their guests—many of whom are lonely migrants to the city—imagine themselves like royalty at home, rather than make them feel guilty about doing something shady abroad.

Here’s what regular patrons do: they sit and lech, for hours, if they can afford it, or for a short while, since the beers are usually expensive. Once they leave after a whole night of ogling that was legitimately paid for, chances are they would be satiated or tired enough to bother with extending their hobby over women on streets during the day. They could go back to the dance bar. It’s an outlet. The lack of it doesn’t solve any problems.

The state never provided any statistics on the decline in any of the crime rates or other vices it sought to achieve with its decision to shut down thousands of such outlets. Nobody asked them to. They needn’t answer even if they were posed the question. A population of over 18 million would equal at least five major countries with separate representatives in the United Nations. The home minister who takes calls on Bombay is answerable to voters in Tasgoan in Sangli.

Over the past few years, and I say this on behalf of roughly all my female friends, Bombay has felt less safe to women than ever before. Practically everyone I meet echoes this sentiment—whether it’s this friend who has a guy watching over her from the road every time she peeps out of her window, or this other buddy who got bashed up by cabbies on a busy street because he responded to catcalls that were directed at his wife. The only thing that has changed in the cultural topography of Bombay over the same few years is the closure of dance bars. I am not saying the two phenomena are necessarily related. Only governments can get away with such untested data. Still, there was a supposed solution to be provided. But you can see far more problems. Women’s safety, if that was the concern, is a burning issue.

***

Samuel Huntington wrote a terse essay, The Clash of Civilizations?, that’s been trashed by more academics since, than the pages of his slim 1996 book. You can’t dispute many of the criticisms. It might be too convenient to club the world between the West and the rest: what does one make of China? Where does one place Japan? Still an easy way to spot the dividing lines in human civilization is to judge societies simply on their public attitude towards one half of their own—women. Saudi Arabia is culturally barbaric for what men think and get away with, and therefore women must do or dress or behave likewise. Same holds true for Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. They can’t belong to the same page of the human calendar as several other countries.

Most of Western Europe or United States or Canada might fare culturally higher on the evolutionary scale in that regard. They’ve worked on it for generations. The girl from Bombay suddenly feels the fresh air of freedom when she goes to New York, in the same way the Delhi girl does when she moves to Bombay, and the one from Meerut probably heaves a sigh of relief as she gets off the train at Delhi.

There’s of course a bit of the ‘Saudi chauvinist’ and the ‘liberal American’ in the Indian. Those traits could co-exist in the same Indian, but it possibly also depends on which part of the country you’re exposed to. Huntington calls India a ‘swing civilization’ in that sense. Both ‘America’ and ‘Arabia’ more often than not merge on the streets of metropolitan India.

Mainstream movies have catered to all these audiences at the same time, but have traditionally aimed their substances at the majority. Influence of cinema in matters of fashion, at least among males, could be overstated sometimes. Styling your hair or look around particular movie stars is usually a quirk restricted to crazy fans. The reach of films in matters of romance remains underrated still. Most young, I suspect, learn their ways to woo the woman they think they love through popular entertainment first. There is no professional help in things like these.

One buddy is as clueless as the other, so you’re not the only one staring at the sun—at Akshay Kumar, the leading man, in a dark