Zainab Bawa’s Blog

11 ^th May 2005

This evening, I went to Jazz By The Bay at Churchgate/Marine Drive . It is after a very long time that I have stepped inside a pub. I don’t like pubs. I feel self-conscious, as if pressured to behave in particular ways. I feel like a little girl who wants to run for cover and hide behind the curtains so that no can see her. Yeah, I feel very watched in the space of a pub, unlike my interactions in vast open spaces where I am very much myself! Maybe private spaces have something about anonymity which is different from the anonymity which operates in public spaces. I wonder how the eye and the mind operate in private spaces as against in public spaces.

The atmosphere in the pub was dark. There were neon lights and loud music. Lots of perfume ordours. Women with blonde and dyed hair. Sometimes a sense of claustrophobia would dawn over me until I decided to watch. These days I have been thinking about passions and desires. And sitting in Jazz By The Bay tonight, I realize that atmospheres can be created to arouse passions and desires – the darkness in the pub, carefully chosen lighting, enough alcohol, etc. Words from Paulo Coelho’s book, ‘The Alchemist’ strike me. The shepherd boy asks a stranger he meets in the desert when the stranger offers him a cup of wine, “Isn’t the intake of alcohol bad?” And the stranger replies, “It is not what goes inside you, but what comes out is important.”

I think about spaces like pubs in the city, where darkness and the loud noise perhaps help us say and do things which we may otherwise be too scared to say or do. Like Raben says, a city is a space of conditions and it is to the surfaces that people wear that we must pay attention to …

(Don’t know what I am writing today …)

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