31 december - Indians with no alchohol.. they still go mad

From kerala happy new year if anyone alights on this blog. It's midnight 5.30 hours ahead of.. you...
I don’t know anyone who’s lived in a police state, apart from a friend who grew up in Poland and remembers black market food and curfews etc. Other than that I hear some reporter friends’ stories about Sudia Arabia and Middle East and as usual I think ‘THANK GOD I HAVE A PASSPORT from a democratic state’. I don’t tend to view India as being a police state but it’s true that they are not as free as we are. There’s segregation between males and females, a bit like we had when we went on coach holidays at 12 and they tried not to make us sit together, but you know, imagine that if you were 30? There’s an unjust caste systems, there’s an appalling dowry systems, there’s frowning and in some places much more than frowning at PDA’s (public displays of affection) between the sexes – of course everyone has been surprised by seeing Indian men walk hand in hand or linked at the waist but that’s in response to not being able to do that at all with females.
But generally when you’re on holiday you don’t think about this. Until you find yourself on the beach at NYE, awaiting fireworks and the place is awash with male revellers who may or may not have purchased some forbidden alcohol and therefore got drunk really fast as they usually don’t drink, and more police than you’ve seen at anti war demonstrations in your country. The police tannoys keep warning tourists to watch out for ‘troublemakers’. The police are clearly looking after the tourist dollars and don’t want the town to acquire any bad reputation for acts that would scare us away.
Personally I think it’s really sad that the women must be at home or hiding somewhere tonight (unless they’re married or with their father, they’re not allowed out) and so the atmosphere is strange ... all these men dancing alone.
At ten mins past midnight, when the last of the fireworks is smouldering (no western standards of health and safety here, the fireworks seem to emanate from within the crowd!), the police are busy chasing everyone home, quite happily using sticks on the ‘troublemakers’. It’s a low level of repression but it’s still difficult to work out what it is that they feel they have to repress. Would people not turn up for work the following day if they drink like westerners or consort with women like westerners do? Anyone with a PhD on why emancipation is so feared?