Mahatma Gandhi's personal effects are being auctioned and the government is maintaining a Sphinx-like silence over it. Sometimes, I think the Congress president should have been born in Egypt instead of Italy though I grant that she certainly understand the second culture better.

Each time there is an issue revolving around Gandhiji, it devolves upon his immediate family to do something about it. If they don't, we certainly don't. The appelation, Father of the Nation, is just a decoration for a man who treated every single Indian as his family and who is long since forgotten by a perpetually expectant country in the serious grip of dying farmers, terrorism, sliding economy and song and dance contests on television (not necessarily in that order).

What do we care about a person who didn't understand fashion or cinema or a slumdog's aspirations to become a millionaire? What do we care about a person whose idea of equality for women was to give them education and equal rights in the household and in the workplace? Would he understand our national obsession with fighting for a woman's right to go to a pub when thousands of women continue to be oppressed at home and outside it? Wouldn't he be branded as regressive if he thinks her right to go to the pub is not as important as being treated civilly by her parents, husband, children and in-laws at home?

So, am I saying women shouldnt go to pubs?

I dislike the pub culture, and am most uncomfortable in a pub. The noise, the loud music and the darkness make me claustrophobic and miserable. I love dancing if I am in the mood. But I would like some room on the dance floor instead of joistling with ten bodies in the darkness for a square centimetre of toespace in a smoke-filled ambience where you can't see your partner.

Having said that, I don't think it's anybody's business to stop me from going to a pub if I want to. Nobody has the right to look down on me if I drink only because I happen to be a woman. I condemn the idea that men can go to a pub but women can't. This is seriously regressive, and wholly worthy of protest. But we need a sense of perspective-- if I am more concerned about the issue of women's rights as the women's lib campaigners have been claiming, I would militate far more over the way women still have to stay at home, suffer death before life in their mother's wombs, and every other form of discriminatory behaviour we are too well aware of.

That's not to say we should let this attack on pub-going women pass. It merits a protest certainly and a sense of outrage at the attacks on those women. But then, why limit your rights to going to a pub? Keep up the good work and extend your battle to far more fundamental matters as well. That, I would say, would demonstrate your commitment to a bigger cause and bring change where it is really necessary.