Dance Bar

There is a famous(infamous) John Donneian quotation on nudity “Full nakedness! All my joys are due to thee, as souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be, to taste whole joys”. There is something enigmatic about nudity, nudity of our self or of another. Freud might have elucidated the connection of nudity with sexual frustrations or may be sexual fantasies, I don’t know. But I know that the sexual fantasies(frustrations) of a man(boy) swivels around a woman’s(girl’s) nudity. Nudity and sex is deemed as the greatest sin in our society guided by moral policing of all sorts from religious to political to spiritual. Osho says that human beings’ have only one energy in them and that is the sexual energy’, and no energy can be tied down, it needs to flow smoothly, any hindrance to the smooth flow of that energy may turn into frustration. Unfortunately in our society the sex surge of an individual is obstructed and dampened to the utmost. The only pornographic animal in this planet earth is human being and he takes it as a credit. The most dreadful thing for a man is to withstand the nudity of a woman without being frustrated. How can he?, he is not accustomed to it. The commodity which should paddle his fantasies, has been converted into his biggest frustration, over the course of human history. Every man yearns to experience that frustration like there is nothing else in the world. He strives to get a glimpse of that nudity, that nude woman body part anywhere and everywhere. When I say every man I literally mean it. Categorisation can be made within like men interested in full nudity, interested in thighs, interested in boobs and navels and some interested in a bikini body(frequent Goa visits of some socialites accounts for this). We can see his frustration on display in railway stations, in buses, in shopping malls, in theatres etc etc. Here comes the significance of dance bars. The wikipedia definition of a dance bar is ‘ The term dance bar is used in India to refer to bars in which adult entertainment in the form of dances by relatively well covered women are performed for male patrons in exchange for cash’. But I would like to define a dance bar as a holy centre were men rinses his sexual frustrations and returns anew with a fresh spirit, so that the public display of his frustrations are blocked. There are hundreds of dance bars in our beloved Mumbai. The ladies showcasing their assets in these bars colours the fantasies and erases the frustrations of men. We can see men from 20 to 70 in these pilgrim centres enjoying themselves with aiyaashi of all kind and the erotica of beautiful women, wavering all around them. Our modern dance bars may be compared to the mujras of yore where women would dance to live classical indian music. But the modern day versions of Umrao Jaan are lusty and seductive than beautiful and charming. The mujras were always presented as an epitome of beauty and class by our literature and bollywood(bollywood has now matured from Umrao Jaan to Chandni Bar) rather than whore houses or brothels. But the modern mujras are converged more to the Chandni Bar image in the modern social projections. The social institutions which goes on devising ‘Labyrinths of Sanctity’ to puzzle its members have completely rejected the existence of these modern mujras. If we plot a graph between the moral policing and decades, it will be a plot with a positive slop. The reason may be the totalitarian tendencies emerging in the social institutions with the passing of years. We are becoming more and more conservative in issues like sex and nudity, its a sad reality. This may be the reason for the steep increase of public display of frustration(as I would like to call it) in recent years. The dance bar system we have is as private as it is public, it is viewed with utmost disapproval by all social institutions. We celebrate ‘in aankhon ki masti’ with stupendous delight, but we tend to reprimand the dance bar system with noxious vigour. It seems paradoxical to me, can anyone give me an answer. These are random thoughts which came to my mind when I thought about the dance bars in Mumbai.