Background music is fine, but live music is banned. In the IT hub of Bangalore the police invoke a 1976 law as they shut down 32 discos and ensure people aren’t dancing at pubs. Bangaloreans aren’t amused. Playwright Girish Karnad calls it the ‘tyranny of the police’. Johnson T A has a report in The Indian Express.
A continuing series of live music, featuring jazz and rock acts from around the country, at one of Bangalore’s popular nightspots, was scheduled to host Virgil Donati — labelled the “wildest drummer in the world” — on August 1. While music lovers in the city geared up for the show, the organisers of the event got a surprise notice from the police. They were told that no restaurant in the city could host live music anymore. Recorded was fine but not live.
In a hurried move, the Virgil Donati-Brett Garsed show was postponed to August 6 and moved to a regular auditorium in the city.
Bangalore, once known as the Pub City on account of a pub culture, finds itself stretching at the moral seams as a small but increasingly international and modern lifestyle vies with conservative administrative mindset. Misadventures in the framing and interpretation of new laws have not helped matters either.
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Stop the moral Policing on our Bangalore