The price of civilization<\/p>\n
JAKARTA (JP): 'Living it up' is a slick phrase, conjuring up
\nimages of cruising in a pink Cadillac with Sylvester Stallone or
\nSharon Stone, bathing in champagne or ... stomping the night away
\nto the rhythms in one of the pulsating pubs that speckle the map
\nof Jakarta.<\/p>\n
We chose a Saturday the kids would give us off, there were no
\nofficial dinners, no friend had issued an invitation, my wife was
\nnot having her crabby five days of the month and my sinusitis was
\ndormant and would thus take the smoke -- so we put on our dancing
\nshoes and went out.<\/p>\n
A pub can be described as a unusually overcrowded room with a
\nbar in the center, bartenders churning out glasses of heinous
\nlooking drinks at fastforward speed to dehydrated people who
\neither guzzle them down at the same speed or sit lusciously
\nperched at the very tip of the bar stool and delicately sip at
\ntheir glasses like birds, in slow motion, barely wetting their
\nupper lips.<\/p>\n
I always thought they were ingesting their drink so slowly
\nbecause they could not afford another, and wanted to make it
\nlast, until I saw my wife do it.<\/p>\n
\"It's style, honey,\" she enlightened me.<\/p>\n
Then there are desperate smokers posing like Clint Eastwood,
\npuffing away as if cigarettes were going out of style. My
\nbusiness instincts told me: a market for gas masks in pubs. Who
\nknows, they could even become a fad and then there would be
\nGucci, Christian Dior and consorts to choose from.<\/p>\n
The next time I looked around the stage for my wife I could
\nsee only her arm a hundred yards away from where I was being
\nswept away by the mob of footsnapping headtappers.<\/p>\n
My eyes were stinging with all the smoke, and this was just
\nour first pub. Just as my breathing started to mimic a hippo in
\nlabor, and I had had five beers, two screwdrivers, and one
\nblueish drink like liquid cyanide spilled on my shirt -- I saw my
\nwife gesturing frantically to meet her at the exit.<\/p>\n
As we stumbled out, I said, \"Honey.. why do we have to get
\ndeafened, crushed, and stepped over when we can just go home,
\nplay a Shirley Bassey record, whip up a frozen Margarita and have
\na perfectly marvelous time ?\"<\/p>\n
\"What! And sit there like mannequins when all my friends go on
\nabout BATS, Zanzibar, the Tavern, etc. You gotta live it up even
\nif you don't feel like it. This is called civilization,\" she
\nreplied archly, with all the hardbitten realism of a Karl Marx.<\/p>\n
I reached a philosophical conclusion that day:<\/p>\n
Living it up doing things we don't really want to because
\neveryone is doing things many of them may not want to do because
\neveryone they know seems to be doing it -- I wouldn't call that
\ncivilization but a rat trap.<\/p>\n
-- Rohan Manav<\/p>", "url": "https:\/\/jawawa.id\/newsitem\/the-price-of-civilization-1447893297", "image": "" }, "sponsor": "Okusi Associates", "sponsor_url": "https:\/\/okusiassociates.com" }