It does not take a great deal of wisdom to see the conflict between prohibition and adulthood. Any sensible person with a reasonable understanding of human misbehaviour would know that stopping grown-up people from what they like doing, or cannot help doing, is not the best way to prevent them from making a nuisance of themselves. This only makes the act of prohibition itself look silly and comically regressive. This is the risk that the Federation of Indian Airlines will be taking if it manages to push through its idea of banning adults from consuming alcohol at the country's airports. Drinking, in any case, is banned on domestic flights in India (which might be the reason why Indians are stereotyped - not unfairly, some would say - as inveterate tipplers on international flights). But the federation alleges that this encourages people to drink immoderately while they wait for their flights, leading to annoying lapses in behaviour immediately before and after boarding.

Private airlines have got together, therefore, in requesting the closure of bars and shops selling alcohol at domestic terminals. To citizens of a modern and mature democracy, this ought to be as ridiculous as suggesting that female flight attendants be banned, or turned into men, simply because some passengers may be given to making inappropriate advances at them. But having said that, and having dismissed such a ban as comical and untenable, it might be more interesting to reflect on the paradox of how a society founded on the reflex of prohibition actually fosters the very forms of behaviour that it is trying to prevent and control.

There could be something deliciously liberating about a big-city airport's departure lounge - that steel-and-glass non-place protected from the stern gaze of the family and workplace, but with the free-market luxuries glimmering everywhere. In these great new halls of consumption and temporary freedom (aptly called terminals), respectable citizens divested of luggage, bored with their gadgets, and waiting to fly off somewhere on their own suddenly feel on the brink of what their normally risk-averse hearts would like to imagine as an adventure. Hence the allure of high bar stools, goaded on by the bits of plastic in their wallets, and the temptation of inhibitions lifted. But India is also a nation of four dry states, and a country where going to vote and showing respect to the nation's great require a degree of mandatory abstinence that would be absurd in any other part of the free world.

In a society where the State feels naturally entitled to prohibit and censor, and the family to repress and control, the power and the freedom to fly might often translate themselves as the licence to misbehave. But clipping the wings by banning the whisky is not the best way to set this right.