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Nightlife in New Delhi India
Friday, 21 December 2007
finaly:
Women are allowed to tend bars
In overturning a 1914 law that prohibited women from tending bar in New Delhi, India, the Supreme Court of India earlier this month not only raised a glass to changing social mores in this country, but also gave Indian women access to one of the most lucrative jobs in the new economy.
Prosperity has resulted in the proliferation of trendy bars across urban India and, as upscale as some of them are, with a glass of Bordeaux costing as much as a laborer's weekly wage, drinking in the minds of middle-class India is beginning to lose its whiff of vice and danger.
On any given night, in any swish watering hole in big-city India, women can be seen drinking merrily, sometimes (gasp!) without the company of men.
Alongside annual restaurant guides, there are now guides to bars. The bimonthly TimeOut magazine, in both Mumbai and Delhi, reviews bars in each issue, which would not be such a big deal were it not in India, where until a generation ago, going out for a drink was considered the preserve either of the very rich, who could afford private clubs and five-star hotels, or of the ne'er-do-well, venturing out to a rough and tumble saloon.
A bartender you can easily rake in more than $1,000 a month, says Soni, which is more than triple the salary of a call center worker, for instance, or that of a waitress at a posh restaurant.
"It's lucrative, in the money sense and the fun sense," she said. "It's very happening. It's an action-packed job."
Each of India's 29 states has its own laws governing the sale and consumption of alcohol and many of them, to varying degrees, restrict women working behind the bar.
In Mumbai, for instance, India's entertainment capital, women are prohibited from working in bars past 8:30 p.m., which is so rarely enforced that Shatbhi Basu, a celebrity bartender who hosts a drinking show on television and teaches a bartending course, was not quite sure what time women were supposed to clock out. Many employers ignore the 8:30 p.m. law, she said, and for the safety of their employees, send them home in a company car.
Nor do the city police seem to enforce another charmingly antiquated regulation that requires drinkers to present a doctor-certified permit that declares them medically in need of drink.
In any case, Basu pointed out, there are not a lot of women tending bar anywhere in India and she did not expect the court ruling to compel women to join the profession in droves. In her bartending course, women students remain rare.
"It's not about the court, it's about the family you come from," argued Basu, 48, who began tending bar in 1981. "Girls want to. At the end of the day it's the family that rules. It's all about the honor of the family‹what will happen, will you be able to get married, all that stuff."
If women could work as police officers and chief executives, the court opined, how could the law keep them from tending bar? The justices called the 1914 law "invidious discrimination perpetrating sexual differences."
The day after the court rendered its ruling, Pradhan, dressed in a black pants suit, was behind the bar, tugging at the beer tap, fixing whiskey sodas and smiling self-consciously for all those who recognized her. She had been anointed by local news media as the capital's first woman bartender.
"Hey, you were on TV!" one man exclaimed. Another was so inebriated that he tried to lean over the bar a few times before security guards urged him along to his room.
Wrestling was being broadcast on the flat-screen televisions on either end of the bar, with one contestant holding another man's head between his knees.
One of the waiters summoned Pradhan and returned a Cosmopolitan that she had just made. "Too strong," was the customer's verdict. Pradhan looked befuddled. "Too strong?" she asked, and added a dash of soda.
source: International Herald Tribune
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