The price of civilization

The price of civilization

JAKARTA (JP): 'Living it up' is a slick phrase, conjuring up
images of cruising in a pink Cadillac with Sylvester Stallone or
Sharon Stone, bathing in champagne or ... stomping the night away
to the rhythms in one of the pulsating pubs that speckle the map
of Jakarta.

We chose a Saturday the kids would give us off, there were no
official dinners, no friend had issued an invitation, my wife was
not having her crabby five days of the month and my sinusitis was
dormant and would thus take the smoke -- so we put on our dancing
shoes and went out.

A pub can be described as a unusually overcrowded room with a
bar in the center, bartenders churning out glasses of heinous
looking drinks at fastforward speed to dehydrated people who
either guzzle them down at the same speed or sit lusciously
perched at the very tip of the bar stool and delicately sip at
their glasses like birds, in slow motion, barely wetting their
upper lips.

I always thought they were ingesting their drink so slowly
because they could not afford another, and wanted to make it
last, until I saw my wife do it.

"It's style, honey," she enlightened me.

Then there are desperate smokers posing like Clint Eastwood,
puffing away as if cigarettes were going out of style. My
business instincts told me: a market for gas masks in pubs. Who
knows, they could even become a fad and then there would be
Gucci, Christian Dior and consorts to choose from.

The next time I looked around the stage for my wife I could
see only her arm a hundred yards away from where I was being
swept away by the mob of footsnapping headtappers.

My eyes were stinging with all the smoke, and this was just
our first pub. Just as my breathing started to mimic a hippo in
labor, and I had had five beers, two screwdrivers, and one
blueish drink like liquid cyanide spilled on my shirt -- I saw my
wife gesturing frantically to meet her at the exit.

As we stumbled out, I said, "Honey.. why do we have to get
deafened, crushed, and stepped over when we can just go home,
play a Shirley Bassey record, whip up a frozen Margarita and have
a perfectly marvelous time ?"

"What! And sit there like mannequins when all my friends go on
about BATS, Zanzibar, the Tavern, etc. You gotta live it up even
if you don't feel like it. This is called civilization," she
replied archly, with all the hardbitten realism of a Karl Marx.

I reached a philosophical conclusion that day:

Living it up doing things we don't really want to because
everyone is doing things many of them may not want to do because
everyone they know seems to be doing it -- I wouldn't call that
civilization but a rat trap.

-- Rohan Manav