Two women in their early twenties have alleged they were thrown out of a Chennai hotel on July 28 on the grounds of their behaviour that the hotel claimed had offended the sensibilities of other guests.
The girls involved were Rasika Gopalakrishnan and Shivangi Singh.
“My friend and I decided to go to a bar called The Slate Hotels on a Saturday night. While dancing, there were 4 to 5 men who were standing at the bar and were constantly staring at us, making us very uncomfortable,” Gopalakrishnan posted on Facebook.
“As far as we knew, almost everyone else was enjoying themselves as much as we did, yet why did we draw such unwarranted attention? Why was it so hard to digest that two people of the same sex were dancing together? I was appalled at the way in which we were immediately fetishized by the people around us (sic.),” Gopalakrishnan said.
According to her, the two went into the washroom.
“Moments later, we hear frantic knocks on our door, ordering us to step out of the washroom. 4 male bouncers and 1 female bouncer were inside the washroom, demanding to know what we were doing in the washroom together. They accused us of ‘doing something else’, they warned us about ‘several complaints’ they had received from the guests, and they insisted that we leave immediately. So we left,” Gopalakrishnan said.
According to Gopalakrishnan, she and her friend were minding their own business without picking a fight with other guests at the hotel neither did they abuse them.
Wondering how the hotel could throw her and her friend without having the decency to explain to them the exact reason, Gopalakrishnan said: “Such offensive and unprofessional behaviour from the staff is UNACCEPTABLE. How dare they have the audacity to assume that we’d be ‘upto something’? (sic.)”
In her Facebook post, Singh said the hotel manager insisted that they had made “the people there uncomfortable by making out on the state” (sic).
According to Singh, the hotel manager told them that he had the video footage of the “making out” and when they insisted on seeing the footage, the manager said, “there is no need to watch any footage, it won’t be necessary”.
“He lied about the footage — it never existed — so that we could be scared into submission, into redacting our own complaints. This is outright manipulation of customers (sic.),” Singh said.
“The manager insisted that they have to keep the place comfortable for everybody in the club, and families etc. were feeling uncomfortable by the mere presence of Rasika and I.”
“But Rasika clearly remembers straight couples being intimate on the dance floor, and while that is completely OK with us, these couples were NOT thrown out of the club for making other people uncomfortable. WE were thrown out because we were making the straight people in the club uncomfortable (sic.),” Singh had posted.
Attempts to reach out to the hotel and the women failed.
“In bars, hotel staff and bouncers keep a watch on the customers whose behaviour is normally out of ordinary. The hotel will take some action against such guests if other guests find such an action offensive,” Yangya Prakash Chandran, Founder and CEO, Crossway Hotels and Resorts told IANS.