Amitabh Nanda: A contagion of stupid club rules has deformed our city

I have always taken great pride in breaking rules.

As an Indian I come from a long line of interlopers, from the father of civil disobedience, MK Gandhi himself, to the up-ender of our rigid caste system, BR Ambedkar, to the gatecrashing JRD Tata, who built the first Taj hotel in Mumbai to spite our British oppressors and their charming ‘No Dogs or Indians’ guest policy.

India’s famous revolutionaries rose up because we have largely been a nation of followers. Cowed down by history and habit, hot weather and a heavy diet, we suffer from a lack of will, which a steady succession of invading bullies have used to control and, yes, rule us.

Over time, the Great Indian Rulebook has been updated with knotty regulations and conservative conventions that today have their tentacles in all walks of life -- in our culture of bureaucracy, our social life, even our religious practices.

No doubt, the stricter the status quo, the greater the number of people who rise up to challenge it will be -- and our local mutineers range from sturdily principled activists, like Arundhati Roy, who has made a career out of empathetic defiance, to the garden variety Mumbai traffic signal jumper, who is quite content to bend the law for his personal convenience and whose only rule is “don’t get caught.”

My own lifelong crusade has been against the capricious rule-making I have found in Mumbai’s clubs -- both night and country -- and I find myself increasingly alienated by their mindless rules and regulations, the real purpose of which should be to bring people together.

Membership matters at gymkhana clubs

Take the case of that holdout of the colonial class system -- the gymkhana club.

Designed as an exclusive enclave to keep the general public out, the “club” of yore is rife with arcane membership rules and instances of arbitrary prejudice.

The Bombay Gymkhana, where, as a dependent member I developed my taste for juvenile delinquency, is a typical example.

“The Gym” as it is called, was chartered "to offer young sportsmen of small means the opportunity of indulging their proclivities at a minimum cost to themselves and at a maximum production of enjoyment to the general public.”

Yet, even today, its regulations are far from sporting.

The “general public” can view the “proclivities” on display, but from a safe distance across a lawn cordon. Membership is technically closed.

And while there are exceptions made for “young sportsmen,” this loophole does not entitle you to use all the club's facilities. During the five year probation period, "playing members" are required to play their representative sport almost every day, putting a severe limit on their ability to concurrently hold a full-time job.

Corporate entities can send their executives here for Rs 25 lakhs per nominee, for a 10-year period.

Members are not allowed to conduct business on the premises, but the busy bar bears enough evidence of boozy deal-making.

It was only as late as 2000 that a bias, which passed on the option to join the club automatically to sons of members but not to their daughters, was reversed. The rival Willingdon Club held out until 2007.

Although this travesty was eventually voted down, women still suffer second-class treatment, for instance in being barred from taking naps in the Siesta Room and having to make do with a smaller gymnasium and a longer walk to the restroom.

Stag nation at Mumbai’s night clubs

While you could probably fault any of our clubs on sexist grounds, you’d have to look further afield -- but only just so -- for instances of reverse sexism.

I’m talking specifically about the widespread and intensely Indian "no stag" policy. Something I’ve suffered under for as long as I have been aware of my own sexuality.

Aurus is a restaurant and nightclub located on a Juhu seaside plot, which the management emphasizes with a stunning repertoire of Sunday “sundowner” acts, attended by an eclectic crowd looking for a dance alternative to a night out.

But try showing up without female company, as I once did, and you’d be hard pressed to press on. I was given the no-stag staredown by a bunch of decidedly non-sunny bouncers -- despite my protestations of being married, beyond the age of active lechery and simply hungry to join my friends who were already inside, several of them female.

On another occasion, another female friend was turned away when she tried to make a dinner booking because the number of guys at her table would have outnumbered the girls.

Well, color me deviant.

I know we’ve got a negatively skewed sex ratio in our country and a poor track record of social commingling, but this is Mumbai in the 21^st century.

The no-stag policy exposes a major limitation of rules: that they leave no room for the exception.

While this may work in black and white matters of social justice, it becomes an act of fascism when applied in more nuanced situations.

Unless Aurus’ management assumes that every visitor is going to pair off in strict heterosexual symmetry and get it on while on its premises, it really needs to empower its staff to exercise some discretion over its entry policy.

Foreigners welcome to Breach Candy club. No dogs or Indians.

It is painful to imagine that a similar, and no-less-twisted strategy of sexual conservatism is at work at the Breach Candy Swimming Bath Trust.

The club, which boasts a gigantic salt-water swimming pool surrounded by acres of tanning space and little else in terms of facilities, has a door policy that allows anyone with a foreign passport to enter, but that only admits Indians who are members.

And membership for Indians here is near impossible without the cash equivalent of a king's ransom.

This would seem an inexcusable act of racist segregation against our own population, if it weren’t for the implicit suggestion that it has been enacted to protect the traditional Indian public from the scandalous sight of blonde sunbathers in bikinis and thongs.

I would buy that argument if the club didn’t offer a direct view to the neighboring Breach Candy Hospital’s convalescent ward. The corollary, that the rule has been drafted to protect liberal foreigners from the prying eyes of desperate Indian men, is probably closer to the truth, and possibly accurate, but nonetheless unacceptable.

Clubs are, by their definition, exclusionary. And the statute that allows them to reserve the right of admission is a form of discrimination.

But when the codes of conduct and the agenda of any group come in conflict with the sovereignty of its host state, the state’s needs must prevail.

In Breach Candy’s case, the options are clear -– either scrap the anti-national subjective entry policy, or allow the hordes of Indians in and perhaps break out the Burquinis.

Tech-no-logic at the racecourse

One cannot help but marvel at how the mobile phone has unleashed mayhem on the old world order. A hilarious instance of the clash of tradition and modernity comes from the Bombay Gymkhana and its no-mobile-phone policy.

I understand that the idyll of a peaceful afternoon spent dozing in the Gym’s verandas is something worth protecting, and that decorum should inform a policy of restricted mobile usage. But this does not explain why phone conversations are actually permitted in the veranda, but not in any of the enclosed areas, except, of course, the men's room.

The entire club is a minefield of regularized use and no-use zones and the policy keeps changing with every committee meeting, where irate members get together to add a life-affirming activism to the club’s lethargic policies.

In the meantime, members are routinely seen ducking behind potted plants, dropping their phones into their sweet corn soup or running in the opposite direction when confronted by the vigilant anti-mobile staff.

The flashy Royal Western India Turf Club meanwhile has applied a strict blanket ban on mobile usage on its grounds, with a steep Rs 10,000 fine, ostensibly to keep punters from engaging in illegal off-track betting.

But the club allows its bookies to carry phones, and extends the privilege to its members for Rs 2,300 rupees a day.

Tell me that isn’t enough to put the “arbit” in “arbitrage.”

Rule number 1: There are no rules

In the face of closed memberships at the legacy clubs and a growing urban population with ever less open space at its disposal, new clubs are springing up to fill the void.

Determined to attract members, they have deliberately drafted lax rules, which are member friendly and which embrace modernity.

However, the new clubs face a contradictory issue: in accommodating the multitude, they lose the aspiration of being elite. And this is arguably the greatest appeal of the old clubs.

Despite their crumbling infrastructure and curmudgeonly attitude, and perhaps because of it, they have forged an authentic character that is hard to replicate. In fact, the archaic and eccentric rules they perpetuate are a large part of their masochistic charm. 

Unless we rise up against this odd tyranny we will remain a bigoted society. Viva la Revoluccion, I say! You old boys up for a game of kabbadi at the MCA club in Bandra Kurla?