But the images of the dancers splashed across the media, despite being dressed in their fineries, were indeed pathetic.

As though they had no other existence in the last eight years except to wait, with their make up on, for the bars to reopen. But these are the very images that the people of Mumbai gloat over. These images, along with the human interest stories beside them, give us, the middle class of Mumbai, sadistic pleasure and the right to comment on their morality. The poverty, squalor, degradation, starvation, disease, violence, suicides…. is all kept out of sight.