This swanky joint in plush South Delhi keeps setting standards that only it can alone emulate. After all, it is rather difficult to maintain yourself as a lowlife.
In June, the Urban Pind joint denied entry to a young female photographer from Nagaland. The decision to do that was purely on racist grounds. When the incident degenerated into a news item, the joint's co-owner Kashif Farooq mumbled some feeble and incoherent excuses, and asserted that there would be no question of apologising. Some arrogant racism that.
As public opinion became mobilised, including a Boycott Urban Pind group on Facebook, and a case was filed over the incident, the owners probably thought its image was taking a beating somewhere. Late last month came an apology from Urban Pind.
So, one would have thought, these racist creeps would have turned over a fresh leaf in their wretched lives and become Indians finally. But no. Racism is such a deep-rooted malaise that it cannot be weeded out just by court cases, and consequent but expedient apologies. So the owners of this obnoxious restaurant/bar are back at their old games.
This time they haven't singled out people from elsewhere in the country -- the Urban Pind folks are just singularly and collectively ashamed of being Indians. [The bunch of upstarts might even jump at the usage of "singularly" herein. But then upstarts are always like that.]
So enamoured are they with white skins that they have gone to the extent of saying Indian men are ill-behaved when it comes to drinking in bars. It has decided to ban entry of single non-white (read, Indian) males into its racist precints.
Their contention is that single men don't know how to behave with women in bars. So if I go to this place with a woman, my wife or girlfriend or whosoever, I am fine. But the moment I don't, I must be some inebriated lecherous forever-groping scumbag. Yet if I were just to be white-skinned, drunk or not, I would be fine.
