The Rock Thing

An engineering college buddy just got married. All of us of the engineering college had pooled in money to get him a wedding gift. Since he is in Mumbai, the responsibility of ensuring he has a gift fell on me. The purchase was to me made on Saturday as he was leaving for his honeymoon on Sunday. The thing he wanted – Camcorder. The location of purchase - CST’s Manish market. He also planned to go to the Independence Rock Concert due to be held at the Gateway of India after the purchase. Now I’m not a huge Rock fan. But since there was nothing better to do, I decided to go along.

Now it so happened that the purchase of the Sony HandyCam took a lot of our time & we were late for the concert. We decided to cancel the Rock program & headed for Café Mondegar (his favourite hangout place). To our surprise we saw many others like us wearing black rock type T-shirts there. They definitely had come for the concert. So what were they doing here? We left it at that & started the beer. It was only the next day that I got to know that the concert was actually cancelled because the police thought that having a rock concert at the Gateway of India would be damaging to the monument. The irony is that the same Gateway of India was host to four other musical concerts supported by the rich & influential. The police somehow have figured out that Rock is evil.

My knowledge of Rock may be limited, but this attitude by the police is deplorable to say the least. I found that after the organizer had got almost all permissions, the event got cancelled just because one person thought that having a rock concert at Gateway of India was not appropriate, this one person being a highly placed police officer. My question is “How can any one person decide what is appropriate?”