Raul Bedi has a fantastic piece in today's Irish Times about the dancing girls of Mumbai. Bedi is a great freelance journalist who has a good eye for the type of 'slice of India' subjects that appeal to Europeans.
The Congress Party, which is currently pretending to run Mumbai (Mumbai is actually run by a coalition of Bollywood executives, Tata company executives, the police and the four or five mega-gangs who do the wetwork for everyone else), has decided to shut down the illegal dancing club scene because it is immoral.
It's actually hilarious. Queenie went to a couple of dancing clubs when she was in Mumbai (purely for the purposes of getting a decent gin and tonic you understand) and they are very tame when compared with European lap dancing clubs.
Apart from overpriced gin and tonics, it's mostly just a lot of very silly gyrating to Bollywood film music and if you're really lucky, a wet sari night. A wet sari scene is the Bollywood equivalent of a really sizzling sex scene in a movie and all the best movies have at least one.
The girls wear saris that are very skimpy by sari standards, but which would look like Sunday Mass clothes if worn on a Saturday night in a typical Irish town. And there's no touching or placing of twenties in g-strings. The men throw the money at the women. The Indian men Queenie saw in the clubs were very nice, but they didn't seem to be able to hold their drink very well and they would get very excited at particular routines and throw LOTS of money at the girls.
However, by Indian standards it is pretty erotic. Indian women are so modest that one day, when Queenie wore a sleeveless tee-shirt in Coloba, which is the tourist area of the city, she got manhandled a lot on the street by guys who were getting very excited at the sight of a shoulder!
Poor girls - they make quite good money dancing for bored Tata executives and bankers night after night. And it sure beats the Mumbai alternatives - sorting through people's rubbish to find recyclables, selling Ganeshi in front of the Raj Hotel, washing clothes or working in Choi (thieves) Market. Or worse, begging or prostitution.
Why is it always women that suffer when the people in charge take a moral stand on things?
1 comment:
"Why is it always women that suffer when the people in charge take a moral stand on things?"
Isn't that what most people (white men anyways) think morality is all about? Telling women what to do or not do? I could be mistaken, but then it's easy to confuse what people say and what people do.
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