Mumbai: Eager constables waiting at every nook and corner with breathalysers, and the economic slowdown has hit tipplers hard. To help Mumbaikars with their ‘drinking problem’ and revive the lost social life around that elusive beer mug, Aditi Shah of Best of Bombay, a Mumbai nightlife blog, has organized the city’s first ‘bar crawl’ to be held on Saturday evenings.

Bar crawl (or bar hopping), is a part of everyday culture in Europe, where a group of people congregate and drink in multiple pubs or bars in a single night. Since most bars in these countries are situated close to each other or on the same street, revellers walk the distance between them. These crawls double up as social gathering for the local expat communities and tourists. Now, Shah wants to introduce the culture of responsible drinking.

 

“Most pubs in Mumbai are just flying deejays down. There is hardly any interactive activity,” says Shah, who expects to fill up 50 seats for the Saturday crawl. Since bars are not very close to each other in Mumbai, revellers will travel in an open BEST bus rented for the evening. The crawl that starts from Bootleggers, a pub in Colaba, will cover Soul Fry and Busaba on its way to the final destination for the night, Red Light. Included in the registration fee of Rs 500 is a complimentary drink at all these pubs.

 

During her backpacking trips abroad, Shah, who has been to some of the bar crawls in Europe, noticed that these fast-paced pub-hopping sessions were great ice-breakers. “When I was in Rome, I didn’t know my way around the place. Joining a bar crawl there, it really helped,” she says.

 

In between all the guzzling, though, Shah wants to make sure the message of responsible drinking isn’t lost. “We are against drunk driving,” says Shah, who has hired chauffeurs for the evening. Revellers will first hand over their car keys to the organisers. At the end of the bus-assisted crawl, they will be driven home by the chauffeurs. Prabhadevi’s Meha Raina, a regular pub-goer, says she signed up for the event purely due to economics. “It sounds like a good deal. You get a complimentary drink, a car and a driver for half the usual price.”

 

Shah plans to organise such crawls every fortnight.