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TREND
CRAZY YOUTH
Rave Parties, Sex &
Scandals
TEENAGERS
ESPECIALLY from elite groups have taken to partying, often getting
themselves caught by the police for illegal activities,
writes NEERAJ MAHAJAN
Last week - Mumbai:
Anti-Narcotics sleuths detained 239 youths attending a rave party at
Mumbai's Bombay 72 degrees East pub in Juhu and recovered Re 1.56 lakh
in cash and around 104 tablets of Ecstasy, 850 drops of LSD and charas
worth nearly Re 10 lakh from them. Eight people, including a woman
found to be in possession of narcotics were taken into custody.
October 2008 - Pushkar: Some
25 foreigners and 15 women were arrested at a rave party at Pushkar in
Rajasthan.
September 2006 - Mumbai:
Mumbai police arrested 80 boys and girls from affluent families and 13
drug suppliers including two women in an early Sunday morning raid at
a farm house in Borivali. Some 50 gm of charas and 10 to 15ml of LSD
were seized from each person in the raid.
March 04, 2007- Pune: 251
youth, including 27 girls were arrested from a hotel in Pune with a
pile of drugs worth Re 5 lakh lying in front of them. The total
quantum of drugs seized was estimated to be approximately Re 3 crore.
10 August 2008 – Bangalore:
Thirty five youth, arrested from a rave party at a dhabha near
Manchinabele dam in Bangalore remanded to judicial custody by a
magistrate.
August 2008-Patiala: A late
night party in the North Indian city of Patiala featuring mostly girls
and a few boys at a city hotel came to an abrupt halt when the guests
of the hotel who complained to the police about their drunken
hooliganism. Few of the 40 odd tipsy girls and boys fled from the
scene when the police arrived but some of the girls emboldened by the
influence of liquor clashed with the police. One of the girls hit a
police official who slapped her back. The accompanying policewomen
swung into action and started beating the other inebriated girls.
Ahmedabad: Six
schoolchildren including four girls got hooked to deadly drugs after
going to a rave party. The girls reportedly got high on liquor, drugs
and 'Ecstasy' tablets and ended up having sex with boys. When the high
wore off, they went into depression.
These are just some of the incidents which made it to the headlines in
the recent past… Quite a few rave parties being organized across
different parts of the country regularly… hardly create a sensation…
particularly because of the hush-hush manner in which they are
organized.
The following inferences can
be drawn from the above cases...
Rave parties and Drug cocktails are becoming the in-thing for college
going youth from well to do families, call centre executives and young
white-collared corporate elite in the blue-chip companies – with fat
salaries, low responsibilities and even lesser awareness as to how to
spend it properly.
Most of these parties are
organized over the week-end, usually at the outskirts of big cities
where the largely young crowd can unwind, do weird things to chill out
or relax and get back to face the challenges of the world the next
Monday.
Not only the metro cities
like Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Madras or Bangalore… but rave parties
are getting extremely popular and being organized quite frequently
even in smaller cities like Pushkar, Patiala, Rishikesh, Kulu-Manali
or Pune
Not just the boys … even
girls have started participating and letting their hair down in a big
way at the rave parties
The Oxford Pocket dictionary of Current English defines Rave as "talk
wildly or incoherently, as if one were delirious or insane".
The trend of Rave parties
began sometime in the '80s in the west where people usually gathered
around a fire, over the weekend and had fun together with disc-jockeys
and other performers playing electronic dance music. Over time, these
parties became associated with all kinds of weird things from trance
music, Para-psychological out-of-body-experiences, and
experimentations with psychedelic drugs to sex, dating and partner
swapping.
In the recent times rave
parties have become synonymous with all night partying and consumption
of drugs like cocaine, Marijuana, hash, Ecstasy, acid and speed. The
groggy eyed youngsters invariably reach home in the early hours of the
morning, pop Valium pills to sleep, then struggle back to work in the
morning—waiting for the next opportunity to party again.
According to a senior police
officer, unlike conventional parties where people get together and
consume food and alcohol and just a few might secretly take drugs
behind closed doors, the rave parties are more of drug related events
where just about everyone openly tries one or a combination of party
drugs like Ecstasy, heroin, cocaine, hash, LSD, codeine, Ice,
ephedrine or marijuana.
College kids do Ecstasy, at
Re 300 to Re 400 a tablet, with an “ecstatic duration” of five to six
hours (ideal for a party). Cocaine, at Re 3,000-Rs 5,000 a gram
depending on the quality, is usually snorted by a slightly older
generation that starts at the late 20s and moves through to the
mid-30s. Sometimes youngsters have a cocktail of drugs to keep pace
with the changing music. Mixing of drugs can be very dangerous and it
should be avoided at any cost.
This is precisely what makes rave parties – a sort of secret,
underground hang-out just to experiment with drugs. "Unlike
conventional parties where the host is someone known to you who is
throwing a party and foots the bill for the food and the booze and you
don’t have to spend anything, rave parties are invariably contributory
affairs and their frequency goes up significantly during the festive
season," Praveen B, a senior event management executive explained.
"In a traditional party, you
are expected to behave in a manner in which the majority of the so
called 'normal' people expect you … whereas in a rave party its quite
'normal' to take drugs and indulge in sexual acts and since that is
what many people around you are indulging in there is nothing shameful
or shocking about it", said Tanmoy (name changed) a businessman who
attended one of the events in Gurgaon a few months back.
Speaking on conditions of
anonymity a PR Agency executive said that most Rave parties are
organized by the drug cartels as a business promotion exercise though
many people who frequently attend these parties may not be aware of
it. According to her the hidden motivation behind organizing rave
parties is to promote the sale of drugs among the younger generation
but since this cannot be done openly, the real organizers remain in
the background and invites are sent to a close community of friends
and contacts through social networking sites like Orkut or Facebook.
The modus operandi is
simple, the organizer either promotes the party through sites like
orkut or sends out individual SMSes and e-mails, asking the selected
invitees to reach the venue as 'a gala party is being held where
high-profile people and celebrities will be present'.
Since it is not legal to
host such parties, they are usually held at secluded places, far away
from the main city. At the entrance of the party venue, guests have to
prove their identity before being allowed in. Usually there is a cover
charge of Re 5,000 or more per couple which takes care of the food and
drinks but drugs have to be paid for in cash.
"Many of my friends have landed up in a debt trap because of their
drug habits. They had to borrow money from friends to pay for the
drugs taken at the parties and as a result the next day they were seen
borrowing from someone else to repay yet another loan" explained
Barkha a college student.
Of late ket or K, ketamine
—a veterinary anaesthetic has started emerged as the latest substance
of abuse at the rave parties in the metros after hallucinogens such as
ecstasy and gamma hydroxy butyrate. When injected, snorted or smoked,
gives an OOBE or near-death experience for about an hour. At Re
35,000/kg it is quite affordable. But at the same time, since it is
neither banned nor is it a scheduled drug, enforcement agencies are
finding it tough to book cases under the narcotic drugs and
psychotropic substances (NDPS) Act.
How do we explain this new
craze among Indian youth towards rave parties? Are these a reflection
of how parents are giving too much money to their children, to
compensate for their own lack of time? Do parents today care or bother
to find out how their children are spending the money? Should we just
dismiss all this as a passing phase in the life of the youth and a
fact of life? Or should rave parties which have become an excuse for
sex, booze and drugs, be banned in our country?
All this has serious
ramifications as nearly 35 per cent of all new HIV infections in India
each year are among young people between the ages of 15 and 24. Every
day, more than 6,000 young people – almost five every minute, become
infected with HIV.
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