Pubs are anathema to the parivar. If a woman must go to a bar, she should be chaperoned by her husband and drink only fruit juice while hubby gets sloshed. That arrangement is acceptable. However, two or three or four girls going unescorted to a pub is against our Indian culture! Why? Firstly, these women are exercising independent choice—always a dangerous thing. Secondly, they are unaccompanied by either uncles or elders. Thirdly, and this is critical, pubs are places where innocent Hindu girls are trapped by Mohammedan men with the aid of alcohol and false promises. Thus, not only is a pub a location for alcoholic vice but a venue for Hindu-Muslim social commingling. Another worry: these Muslim males are invariably fair, handsome and virile, so our pure Hindu girls are easily lured. Consequently, pub culture is a source of twin evils: liquor and inter-communal intimacy. It is okay, even admirable, for Hindu men to have illicit sex before, during and after marriage, but for the Bharatiya nari, sex outside marriage is a sin guaranteed to send her straight to hell. Only when the parivar accepts that adult men and women have an equal right to do ‘evil’ will it come to terms with pub culture.
The American journalist-writer, H.L. Mencken, believed that once you put a few drinks inside a woman, you are 90 per cent sure of getting her into bed. If he were alive today, Mencken would be a card-carrying member of the BJP.
