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