Oh, for that good old laissez faire & lassi fare

Pete McCarthy, philosopher, comedian and travel writer, once wrote, ‘Never pass a bar with your name on it.’ Without partaking of its wares, that is. A quarter of a century back, I would constantly put this adage to test. In my case, though, instead of a bar or pub, it was a dhaba. Those days most colonies in Delhi had at least one Chowdhury Dhaba, and if I was passing through one, I would make it a point to stop and have at least a glass of sweet lassi. More often than not if it were in the afternoon, I would have rajma or chole-chawal, or if it were night, thick tandoori rotis laced with Amul butter, dal fry and anda bhurji. I was constantly hungry those days.

There was this one heavenly dhaba in Kilokri, across the road from Maharani Bagh, where at my insistence the ustad mixed the double scrambled eggs into the dal fry and then re-fried it – a dish that quickly caught the imagination of hoi polloi, I was chuffed to find.

Most dhabas if you were a regular patron, allowed you to carry and imbibe a nip of Old Monk with your dinner. They would provide the Thums Up in a steel glass. You mixed the drink discreetly under the table or by turning your body at a slight angle from others. They would be doing the same. A time of laissez faire that is unthinkable today. There was no one jagruk enough to record your indiscretion with a mobile phone. After your dinner, you lit a Gold Flake or Navy Cut while you waited for your bill, which rarely exceeded ₹40. After 8 pm these dhabas, if they were not near DU or JNU, were women-free spaces like the old colonial clubs.

It was a time when individual rights had more traction, at least for men. Private space was actually private. When as minister, actor Vinod Khanna suggested that all Indians should carry an ID card at all times, he was called a ‘crypto-Nazi’ and booed off the stage. Cut to present times, you wouldn’t be able to book an Uber before the app collects all your data and plays for you ‘Gangnam Style’ as that was the last song played by Alexa in your home. The fact is, we are all living in a post-privacy world.

In my mind, it is around 2001 that we started complaining more and became more intolerant towards individual rights and privacy. Why 2001? I have no data to prove it, except that I got married and two planes crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York that year.

Normally sensitive men and women who would be called ‘woke’ in a decade’s time suddenly became intolerant towards smoking and drinking in public places, car pollution etc. Soon, even more sensitive men and women, taking the cue, called for ban on beef eating, namaz in public spaces, wearing the hijab, recitation of Saraswati Vandana in schools. One kind of intolerance begets another. One complain leads to another. All calls for bans have similar totalitarian roots.

Soon with the arrival of social media, we joyously abdicated our right to privacy and became marketers of ourselves. The government noticed it and brought in Aadhar. Vinod Khanna did have the last laugh. The time is not far away when the smartphone will be the umbilical cord that will never be cut. And somewhere in the middle of all this sensitivity and wokeness, the springtime for Chowdhurys ended. Now you would be hard pressed to find a single Chowdhury Dhaba in any of the south and central Delhi colonies. Demonetisation was the final nail hammered into their coffins. Ashok Lahiri, in his sprawling overview of the Indian economy, India in Search of Glory, points out that the ‘big painful jolt’ of demonetisation ‘might have encouraged digital payments, but the cash shortage had an adverse impact on the economy.’

All the Chowdhurys now have prudently gone into ‘property’. Intellectual or otherwise.

The writer is author of The Time of the Peacock