Home / Sunday-mid-day / / Article /
Celibate in Madras
Updated On: 02 May, 2021 10:17 AM IST | Mumbai | Team SMD
The posthumous English translation of celebrated playwright-actor-director Girish Karnad`s memoir is as outspoken as the man himself
Listen to this article :
This Life At Play: A Memoir of Girish Karnad was released in Kannada in 2011. The English translation by Srinath Perur, to mark his 83th birth anniversary, releases this month. Pic/Getty Images
I lived in Madras from my twenty-fifth year to my thirty-second. I had a good salary, a car and a house, and my association with the Madras Players and my Oxbridge background saw to it that there were plenty of attractive young women around me.
Madras was under prohibition the seven years I was there. When I arrived, drinking was rare in the middle class, especially so in Brahmin families. By the time I left, it was quite common to find some ‘social drinking’ going on in the evenings. As drinking gained popularity, it became harder and harder to find alcohol. But I was working at OUP, and from time to time we had visitors from England and other countries who were eligible for a liquor permit. As soon as they arrived, we would whisk them off to the excise office, have them write out in the appropriate bureaucratese that there was danger to their health if they failed to consume alcohol, get a signature, take them to Spencer’s, and buy the quota of bottles allotted to them. It can be said that true independence from foreign rule arrived in the state only with the lifting of prohibition.
Trending Stories
Latest Photos
Latest Videos
Latest Web Stories
ADVERTISEMENT
Mid-Day Fast
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT