It is a battle my partner and I resuscitate at regular intervals. And no, it is not one between the two of us.
Every once in a fortnight, we recite for each other the ills of staying too long on our devices. In other words, our devices have ensured that we have no possibility of being left to our devices. We make a pact to get off the computer, the phone, the tablet by 8 pm — no 8 is too little; 9? Okay, let’s begin at 9, and if it works, then we’ll aim for 8. We lament modernity, work, low attention spans, the loss of meaning, rude young people, traffic, and climate change. We walk home, intending for that one night at least to turn away from that eye-watering screen.
It works for a few days. Today is not one of them.
Not so many years ago, before the advent of smartphones, I did used to be stuck to my laptop. Except that said laptop was an atrociously heavy Compaq Presario and did not lend itself to easy carting around. As a result, my evenings were my own. Free for conversation, quiet commutes, end-of-day shrugs. Perhaps even a bar or two.
The other day, after a very long day and week, my friend and I made a beeline for the nearest restaurant-bar. Chennai alcohol licences make it very hard to run standalone bars and hence this hyphenated category makes a necessary appearance in our lives. It’s either that or a TASMAC run and our homes. I digress. So, yes, nearest bar. And as we sipped at our G&T’s and perused the random art on the walls, I wondered if I had ever been in an Indian bar with an Indian aesthetic. All the ones I had ventured to in recent times, provided some version of 70’s Mogambo dens or post-industrial-apocalypse abandoned factories of exposed-piping fame or former gentlemen’s clubs of the “angrez chale gaye” order. In other words, postmodern caricature masquerading as self-aware irony. In some cases, not even. And this in the land of Harivanshrai Bachchan’s “Madhushala”. Sigh.
I add “Bar” to my long list of things I would do if I weren’t living this job. I mean, yes, it would require some upskilling. For the only thing I have to claim for myself is the experience of sampling many bars across the world. In anticipation of the research I’d have to put in to get behind this particular scheme, I bookmark “The World’s most beautiful bars.”
Business plan aside, what I miss most that I misrecognize as the missing of an aesthetically ordered bar, is the pleasure of company sans agenda. Of people mutually hanging up their work-brains to partake in the business of talking about the world, or gossipping, or ranting, or even just appreciating the fine stylings of a good martini. Now, does this necessarily require alcohol? Possibly not, but it does tell you something that “alcohol studies” has been a bonafide, interdisciplinary stream of work since the middle of the 20th century. As it should be.
But, that alcohol is the necessary counterpart to the long, hard, workday whether of the white-collar or blue-collar variety (therefore also dictating the nature of the bar accessed) points decisively to the necessarily alienating nature of most modern work. Even as now, my constitution cannot take as much of the substance as it used to, I locate the act of drinking in relation to temporarily leaving behind the travails of work. If one were to locate alcoholism along this continuum, therein lies the malaise of the modern.
What might my dream bar be then? Perhaps one like Hannah Arendt’s legendary cocktail parties that Alissa Wilkinson writes so compellingly about in “Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking and Living from Revolutionary Women”. Soft lights, music (not loud), conversational hubbub, cheese, sprouts, fruits, nuts, crackers and chaat, and endless conversation. The kind that you remember from youth and insouciance and bodies of nocturnal persuasions. Where time melts like a Dali clock. Where love and lust bloom in inseparable measure. Where frisson is the order of the day, but does not end in morning-after regret. Where difference feeds vitality. And where one is free to dream of a world still unmade in the aftermath of a hangover.
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What am I reading?
Salty, as mentioned above (It is a quick read. Many sublime essays. Some not so. I read it mainly because it feeds into my ongoing obsession with women, food, and great conversation)
Also, Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades. Which you must read. Must.
Why, you ask. Well, because the short story is an astounding literary form. Its capacity to evoke whole, lived worlds, and hint at the possibility that others share as much of a rich inner life as us, is to me, a necessary reminder on how to live gracefully in the world. Just that.
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What am I eating?
A really, beautifully baked whole slab of feta cheese with cherry tomatoes, olive oil, thyme, bashed coriander seeds, and roasted red and yellow peppers. With crackers. It will be on my bar menu soon.