The tradition of drinking ~ preparing, consuming and offering alcohol to guests and deities ~ in india, is an ancient one. there is still a strong culture of fermenting cereals such as rice, barley and millet among tribal communities in central and northeast india, and of tapping toddy palm and extracting the nectar of the mahua flower for fermentation. Protector spirits are offered alcohol among hill communities, particularly in Nepal and tibet. among Hindus, lord Bhairava is supposedly partial to country liquor. it keeps him appeased. However, these local brews ~ raksi, chhang, mahua ~ are not commercial. they are prepared at home, have a short shelf life and are neither stored nor bottled. and because every home has its own recipe for brewing, there is no consistency in taste or alcohol content. there are exceptions. Feni, a spirit made from the juice of the cashew apple, is bottled and sold commercially, but its sale is restricted only to the state of Goa as it is considered country liquor. the sri lankan coconut arrack has done better. With a taste that is considered to be a blend between rum and whisky, it is set to conquer the markets of the Uk and the Usa. In mainland india, however, consuming alcohol socially is a fairly recent phenomenon. Fifteen years ago, if a middle class indian family was looking for a groom for their daughter ~ usually fair-complexioned and convent educated ~ chances were that they would be looking for a well-settled (read, government job) teetotaller and non-smoker. a government job ensured you never earned enough to be lured by the vice of drinking or smoking and would probably hand over your entire salary to your wife at the beginning of each month. to enjoy an occasional drink back then meant, you were a depressed alcoholic, who chose liquor as an escape mechanism. Popular culture only reinforced this belief; generations of Hindi cinema portrayed drinking in a stereotypical way. How many of us recall an angry Bollywood hero drinking to get over heartbreak? or foolishly challenging a villain to a fight and getting thrashed in the process? Only the suave amitabh Bachchan could charm Parveen Babi with a nonsensical song in Amar, Akbar, Anthony. But he was perhaps the only exception. the beautiful meena kumari cut a rather tragic figure as she took to drinking to soothe herself fromthe painof a perverse husband in Sahib, Biwi aur Ghulam. and then there were drunken comics ~ keshto mukherjee and Johnny Walker, who stumbled about, blabbered and made a ridiculous spectacle of themselves. Hum Log, an iconic drama aired in the early 1980s, had an inebriated character who was not only despotic but also utterly dysfunctional. Nukkad, another popular tV soap opera from that time, featured khopri, a character who is never sober. Naturally, he is filthy, inarticulate and never taken seriously. the message was clear: drinking is bad. if you drink, you have a bad family life, an awful professional life and nobody is attracted to you. if you drink, youre a loser. Things are different today. We have witnessed this interesting turn of events. Growing up, our friends would sneak alcohol, usually rum, out of their fathers bars that we would mix with coke or water and consume surreptitiously in locations that should not be revealed. some of us, who were slightly bolder and certain that nobody would report us to adults, visited olympia on Park street (calcutta) for a beer or two. some of us had kind uncles and aunts who indulged us on occasion: Youre eighteen, have a glass of wine! music to the ears! Being thus invited meant you were really an adult. it was this elite club that we all wished to belong to and drinking was just one way of feeling we had come of age. Getting drunk and acting in a silly manner was always unhip and unsexy. We pitied people who didnt know their limit and ended up with their heads inside the toilet after a drink too many. even so, most of us have been down that route! drinking and driving was taboo. We did see a few of our acquaintances crashing cars and bikes and having their bodies rearranged. We were growing up as india was opening up slowly, but very surely, to embrace the modern and new. Foreign brands were launching their products in the country in the 1990s. As Bacardi breezed into our lives, giving us an option other than the dark but venerable old monk, we experienced for the first time ~ the mojito. somewhere in the Western Ghats and in the ample lap of the deccan, grape was being cultivated for wine. clearly, the indian consumer was ready for heady experiences with alcohol. in the last five years, with indias phenomenal economic growth, luxury brands have started to explore markets in the country among the discerning youth that enjoys single malts, vodka and hand-crafted beer. |