At last I know why certain kinds of entertainment establishments all over the world are called Buddha Bars.

On the face of it, it is such an incongruous name: Prince Siddartha who renounced the material world to become the Buddha, and in whose teachings the word ‘sorrow’ recurs often as an indicator of the state of the world.

Then there is the image of the Buddha, sitting austerely under a tree, lost in deep and completely silent meditation.

What possible connection could there be between all this and between bars whose sole purpose is to dispense hedonistic pleasures in return for large sums of money, where the ambience ranges from loud to raucous?

I think I found the connection last week.

We were at The Blue Frog, Mumbai’s happening nightclub. Even though it was a week-day, all seats were booked well in advance and by 10 pm even standing room was hard to find. The reason: Nitin Sawhney was performing. I have been listening to his curious but completely beguiling mix of Rabindra-sangeet type Bengali songs teamed up with jazz and electronica. His themes have reflected the concerns of the Britain he grew up in (multi-culturalism, politics, spirituality). You would think that this heady mixture would get him a small cult following and nothing more, but there we were at the Blue Frog, and it was bursting at its seams.

Then the music began, Sawhney himself on one side of the stage, a tabla on the other. In the middle were the singers, one of them a statuesque blonde with blue eyes who sang Bengali as to the manner born. Her singing too had the right lilt, the soft, emotional undercurrents of each song put across in a wispy voice.

If, that is, you could hear it. For all around us was young and dynamic Bombay, youthful men and women for whom money was no object, who spoke in accents that ranged from Delhi to London to New York. And did they speak! The music, which they had paid money to hear and for which the discomfort of standing for a couple of hours seemed not to matter, was a mere backdrop to their nattering.

They spoke, not in whispers, but in the loud, confident voices of people accustomed to making money. I checked on the accents, and who they belonged to, and surprise, surprise, they belonged to not only our own countrymen but very many expats too. All national barriers were down when it came to their strident back-slapping bonhomie.

If I had said, “Shut up, you fat loud mouths,” pitching my voice to the shrillest high notes, no one would have heard me.

That’s when the Buddha revelation came to me: The only way I was going to enjoy the music was to shut out the squawking around me.

To do that I would have to achieve a Buddha-like tranquility, create an island of silence in the midst of a sea of noise. I was the Buddha in the Buddha Bar, and the music was once again mine to hear.