Gandhi might be the Father of the Nation, but on 2 October, his birth anniversary, few drinkers look at him with fondness. On that day, the Indian nation has deemed that no one has the right to consume alcohol. And then there are a range of other occasions that visit upon us—polls, electoral results, when a leader dies, when there is violence or prohibitory orders, some festivals and more—when you are a criminal if you buy alcohol or are even caught with a bottle in your haversack. Even so, while as Indians we take just about anything that the state foists on us, it is when you experience a Dry Day in Goa that you realise how absurd this rule is.

Recently I went to Goa during a spell of three dry days. Every tourist I met in shorts and tees had just one question: “Boss, do you know where to get a bottle?” Many chased leads given by eager two- and four-wheeler rental shacks. If you were in south Goa, they would whisper conspiratorily, “It’s available in north Goa,’’ or, “Go to the Karnataka border.’’ Restaurant waiters were at the receiving end of client temper. The day stores opened, there were queues at 9 am with people stocking up as if the world would end by noon.

Goa depends on tourism for revenue. At least for domestic tourists, cheap liquor due to lower excise duties and local taxes is a major draw. In the past three months, the state has had three dry spells. First for the Assembly elections, then during results and then over 15-17 May for the panchayat elections. There is another byelection coming up in June. The logic of keeping people sober during elections is to not allow liquor to influence franchise choices and because drunkards create trouble. But then political parties anyway buy in bulk beforehand and supply at their convenience. Like all bans, whether social or those imposed by the State, Dry Days too don’t work. What it does is encourage sales of liquor in black and that then brings in corruption. For, once there’s a law being broken, there’s also a policeman being bribed. It’s time to take a hard dry look at dry days. The only thing it actually does is give the state a holiday from liquor revenues.

After the recent Madras High Court injunction that made internet service providers (ISP) block access to popular torrent websites like The Pirate Bay, and video-sharing websites like Vimeo and DailyMotion, there has been a string of cyber attacks on the parties involved.

The Chennai-based anti-piracy firm Copyright Labs had secured this injunction in late March and it came into force in mid-May. In retaliation, the well-known hacker group Anonymous—which had previously targeted government websites in China for restricting free access to the internet—launched its ‘OpIndia campaign’. Asking people to stand up against ‘internet censorship’, the group announced its campaign in a video on YouTube.

So far, it has launched distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the websites of the Supreme Court, Department of Telecom, Congress party, BJP and Copyright Labs. On 23 May, it also hacked Reliance’s Big Cinemas website. Reliance is one of the ISPs that has blocked access to file- and video-sharing websites. The Twitter handle @opindia_revenge, has been tweeting the various websites that Anonymous has been taking down.