A Great Reveller

WHEN Kalyan Sanyal, a wiry 31-year-old Calcutta-based film assistant, got married in a city church a few years ago, he rented four cars, stacked them with liquor and parked them in a dark and shady corner of the compound. Guests, tipped well in advance, slipped out from the soporific nuptials, slunk into the dark corner, hopped into the cars, and huddled together pouring themselves stiff shots of the whisky, rum, vodka and brandy stored in suitcases. A friend drank 10 pegs of brandy at one go and passed out inside a car, but the binge continued well into the night. These 'mobile bars' were just for the reception night. "I also drank seven pegs on my marriage night," says Sanyal, pouring himself a large rum at a party on a squally evening last week. "Drinking is a part of life now. It's the best socialiser, isn't it?"

In Delhi, Gurmeet Singh, who lives a world apart from Sanyal's hard scrabble central Calcutta neighbourhood, agrees wholeheartedly—and serves up unusual metaphors for his favourite hobby. "Mankind's great creation is alcohol," gushes the dapper 38-year-old businessman, who has six bars at home, drinks thrice a week and spends up to Rs 20,000 a month on booze. "Having liquor is like owning a beautiful car. Liquor enhances my emotions, makes me feel easy, even philosophical."

In dowdy Bhubaneswar, Manjusri Hota had her first drink, a beer, last fortnight with friends and floated on cloud nine. "I never knew I could get such a high," says the 23-year-old student who can't wait for a hush-hush beer party her friends are planning.

Sure enough, suddenly more and more Indians are discovering the headiest high of their lives. At homes, workplaces, eateries, bars, clubs, planes, trains, automobiles, cemeteries, practically anywhere, they are keeping their date with Bacchus and guzzling away to glory. Cutting across class lines and rubbishing social taboos, men, women and now teenagers are fuelling the highly regulated but fast growing Rs 4,000-crore liquor-and-beer industry.

No wonder the 55-million-cases-a-year alcohol market is growing furiously: 18 lakh fresh bottles enter our stores every day, and 1.5 lakh bottles are sold every hour during a normal 12-hour business day of a wine store. With over 100 brands in the fray, industry pundits brag that growth rates will top 10 per cent over the next decade. "There's been a new brand launch in the market every fortnight for the past 18 months," says V.V. Acharya of Ambrosia, the Mumbai-based trade journal.

Time was when life had a puritan air, liquor was taboo, the stereotype of a drinker as a pathetic drunkard reinforced repeatedly in films and storybooks. When few kept liquor at home, and none served spirits to guests. When children never drank in front of parents. And perhaps most importantly, when women never drank openly—or in the closet. The times are changing, and rapidly: the taboo is gone, families stock liquor, drink together and serve happily to guests; even teenagers taste the heady brew. "The climate has changed," says Meetu Sengupta, 28, a Delhi-based PhD student, savouring her cocktail. "People go out a lot more, nobody worries about age limits, drinking has been glamourised." And, oh, she "especially sees women drinking a lot more."

That is possibly the most striking episode in the Great Indian Drinking Binge story. Indeed, it probably telescopes the changed status of many middle-class women. Professionally focused, finan-cially independent, socially assertive, they have successfully shrugged away centuries-old gender stereotypes. Of course, there is also the information revolution of the nineties, with the explosion of enticing portrayals of the turn-of-the-century modern woman. So, the portrait of a drinking woman as a licentious shrew is fading; and more and more women are flaunting their drinks these days.

 It is important to note, however, that this is a recent trend, not quite a generation old. In conservative Chennai, where liquor revenues trebled after the government relaxed prohibition in the '80s, Pramila, a 42-year-old college teacher, is "shocked" to see more girls drinking now. "In our student days,", she says, "only five or six girls in a batch would have consumer liquor. Today, at least 25 per cent of the girls are hooked to alcohol."

Meghna Kanwar Basu, 27, who lives in Delhi and works with a networking company, exemplifies the "new generation" Indian woman, with liberal parents and an understanding spouse. She first tasted alcohol during her college days: her father was downing his rum at home and asked whether she wanted a sip. Now Basu and her husband, who works in an advertising firm, share a peg of vodka or rum-and-cola every night. There are no qualms, no question of drinking behind her in-laws' backs. "I drink because I feel very relaxed," she says. "We both reach home late, so a drink together takes out all the tension of the day."

Or consider Anita Bhandari, 27, an ex-air hostess. Her husband gave up drinking after he got hopelessly sloshed one night; but Bhandari, who began with beer during the lonely night stops at work, still drinks moderately. She doesn't face any heat at home either. "I drink because it gives me the high that I am looking for," she says. "You can have fun when you drink."

WITH young working upwardly mobile Indian women, alcohol is also gaining lifestyle connotations: in a bar, she sips her Bacardi rum or Smirnoff vodka, while her male partners usually holds a boring beer. "A lot of these young girls are sipping images that these foreign white spirit brands evoke, not the drink," says an industry executive. And middle-class housewives, of course, are mostly cajoled by drinking husbands to join the merry making. "I can't shut myself in a home when our friends come home and drink, can I?," says Mousumi Dasgupta, a thir-tysomething teacher. "So I joined the booze party, and now enjoy my whisky even while cooking a meal for guests."

Giddy on consumerism and fed on a diet of homemade soap on television where cellphones, booze and high infidelity are the new symbols of cool, middle-class homes are embracing alcohol as never before. This is helped by nuclear families and fading taboos. Basu and her husband serve alcohol to guests "99 per cent of the time". In Mumbai, far away from the beat-fueled razzmatazz of Club Abyss and Razzberry Rhinoceros, conservative Gujaratis and Punjabis hole up at homes enjoying what are locally known as 'afternoon socials': drinking at noon and partying till the evening. And in Chennai, V. Raghavan, an employee with a multinational firm, sighs: "The only way left to maintain relationships is to invite some friends for an evening cocktail. It is in consonance with the spirit of the times."

Now even niche professional groups are bonding over booze. Take, for instance, the five-year-old Beer Drinkers Association of Information Technology (BAIT), a mobile gaggle of techy tipplers formed by Pradeep Kar, CMD of Microland, a Rs 148-crore Bangalore-based info-tech firm. Some 30-odd tech honchos, including people like Som Mittal, MD of Digital India, and infotech consultant Mike Shah, meet once in six months on extended weekends and chill out over beer and games. "Drink is the keyword at BAIT," Kar told a journalist once, "like think is the keyword at IBM."

In the process, an old social calender is being rearranged. For example, what happened to high tea, one may ask. "Whoever asks you to come over for tea?" asks Paramjeet Singh, 34, a Delhi-based exporter, who doesn't know anybody in his business who doesn't drink. In Calcutta, Moi Roy can't remember an invitation for tea in a long, long time. "No get-together, no party, works without alcohol these days. The conversation just ceases," says the 52-year-old advertising professional who downs three pegs a day, five days a week. "I have tried with Coca-Cola, but everything remained frozen till the whisky came out. Anticipation levels for booze are so high!"

It's not all spirited fun, however. For kids on fat allowances, a drink, according to Pradeep Rodrigues, assistant editor, Bombay Times, works while making up or breaking up with their girlfriends. At south Mumbai pubs young girls down tequilas while their boyfriends guzzle beer. "I see 16-year-old boys and 14-year-old girls asking for beer these days," he says. A restroom attendant at a five-star hotel reports sloshed teenagers in the ladies, "falling all over each other, lying on the floor and getting sick".

Teachers report a threefold increase in booze binges among youngsters in high school. The teenagers and the youth are also fuelling the demand for beer. "Our research shows that people in the age group of 18 to 24 years are the largest consumers of beer, and are driving its growth," affirms Kalyan Ganguly, CEO and president of the breweries division of the Bangalore-based UB Group, which runs 12 breweries today, up from eight just 10 years ago.

The birth of the booze cool has taken some time though. During his younger days, Roy used to tip-toe into his south Calcutta home after returning from a late drinking session—only after checking with his mother whether his father, an engineer, had dozed off. Three days after he got married in the late seventies, the bright young copywriter actually served his wife two whiskies "because she wanted to find out what was this big thing about drinking." Nothing much happened: "She just slept away the night." A week back, this avuncular professional popped a bottle of champagne at home and offered it to his three teenage daughters. "My daughters have no hang-ups about alcohol," he says. "But if I come home tipsy, they will object."

 In India, alcohol is beginning to mean different things for different people. For yuppies, a drink is a lifestyle option and a stress reliever. For the mollycoddled inhibited middle class flush with disposable incomes, it's a great leveller. And for the ghetto underclass, an escape, as always, from depressing realities.

But for a largely homebound, inhibited people living in high-pressure, low-entertainment cities and towns, alcohol is simply opening up the floodgates of socialising. Liquor sales in Punjab climbed rapidly during the days of terrorism in the '80s as people were forced to stay indoors in the evenings. "Most of us drink because we have nothing else to do in the evenings and holidays," says Delhi-based Vishal Sha-nkla, a 20-plus travel agent, whose monthly alcohol and grocery purchases work out out to Rs 2,000. "Where can you go? Drinking has become the easiest form of entertainment and drinking."

 So the Great Indian Drinking Binge shows no signs of abating at all. One small example: the number of Mumbai's fabled 'permit rooms' and beer bars has grown by 30 per cent in the past five years. "There's an excuse to drink all the time now," says Rajesh Srivastava, who worked in the liquor industry for 11 years before joining DCW Home Products as vice-president (marketing) sometime ago. "I am drowning my sorrows in drink because my boss fired me, I am celebrating with a drink because I got a promotion, I am getting sozzled because I am getting married, and I am drinking to get over a death in the family."

THE signs are everywhere. In the packed 100-odd hip pubs nestling in the bright lights of Brigade Road to the orthodox neighbourhood of Basavanagudi in Bangalore city. In the busy noon hours of sad and smoky egalitarian bars of Calcutta where punters, clerks, intellectuals and businessmen commingle over cheap rum. In the 1,269 'permit rooms' or bars and 210 beer bars in Mumbai where consumers mix the pleasure of a drink with business. In the long queues downing one for the road from plastic cups outside Chennai's crummy wine shops like 'Appar Wines' and 'Abel Wines, all named after poets and gods. In the noisy liquor vends in Haryana, where a 21-month-long prohibition lifted this March left 60 dead in 16 hooch tragedies.

 But old habits die hard. In their manic devotion to Bacchus, Indians still don't come clean on drinking habits. Three years ago, when a southern-India-based liquor giant carried out a survey on middle-class drinking habits in Chennai, it found a paltry 7 per cent of the respondents admitting to their fondness for alcohol. The company's own conservative estimates based on its product sales to the segment hovered in the region of at least 20 per cent. "A lot of people are not willing to concede they drink liquor," says a liquor company executive. A number of liquor shops in Chennai, for example, are called brandy shops and some brandy brands have names like 'Doctor's Brandy'. The subliminal message: hey, you're not drinking alcohol, its grape juice, because that's what the doctor ordered! There are other sobering facts. With whisky accounting for 64 per cent of all liquor sales, India is a hard liquor country. Internationally, whisky and hard liquor sales are plummeting, while sales of soft liquor such as white spirits, low alcohol beverages, and flavoured alcohol are climbing in these health concious times. Ergo, whisky's stranglehold possibly points to a link between drinking and social and domestic tensions. "The number of lonely drinkers in bars has gone up phenomenally in the past few years," says Bhaskar Majumdar, 38, a Calcutta-based chemicals manufacturer and an occasional drinker.

Then there is the growing problem of alcoholism and related health problems: 50 per cent of beds at Bangalore's St John's Medical College, for example, are occupied by patients suffering from alcohol related cases; the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences has 60 beds for alcohol related cases today, up 10 times from 10 years ago; and alcohol directly contributes to 30 per cent of suicides in India today. In the haze of alcohol, inhibition levels are also dropping dangerously low. Booze-induced unprotected sexual flings with rank strangers are on the rise. The upshot can be disturbing: a year-long study by Bangalore-based Freedom Foundation on the number of alcohol-related HIV cases in the city found that 63 of the 90 patients covered had contracted the infection within a year of becoming alcoholic. These included several women.

But with white spirit sales growing at a steady clip of 20 per annually since 1990—it commands 5 per cent of the liquor market today—there's a silver lining: more and more Indians are now drinking to socialise, not to get high. Repositioning of white spirts such as vodka and gin from girlie to lifestyle drinks has also helped: males are lapping up Bacardi and Smir-noff, the first and second largest selling alcohol brands in the world. The growing popularity of white spirits, say industry insiders, is resulting in a profound social impact: the rise in "decent" mixed drinking. "There's an interesting shift taking place," says Srivastava. "With your wife or girlfriend around in mixed drinking circles, you can't afford to get high and run the risk of misbehaviour. So there's a definite trend in the upper-end classes to take white spirits and socialise."

BUT silently, unknowingly, the Great Indian Boozing Binge, say sociologists, is a great leveller and binds people, contributing to greater social intercourse. "I see maidservants, house-owners and girls queuing up at liquor shops," says Dr Prasanta Roy, head of the sociology department at Calcutta's Presidency College. "Quite latently, alcohol is declassing people and breaking down gender barriers. Then I see people at gatherings who mix drinks for the entire gathering, he's either aware or checking out each person's tastes. This is a bonding experience."

Even, in the trade, a subtle reversal of roles is taking place. Just like the British introduced India to whisky—the first whisky distilleries in India came up in the late 19th century—and we lapped it up, India is actually offering the world the finest dark rums and, now, an internationally popular beer too.

So let the good times roll with booze. Last week, faceless bartenders from the conservative south did a first: they whipped up concoctions in a best cocktail contest in Bangalore. Martin Verghese from Bangalore won the best professional bartender with a cocktail called Catherine, named after his wife. "It's her second name though," he jests. "Once I named a cocktail after my daughter and someone came up and said, 'can I have your daughter?'" Far away, in Calcutta, Ashish Sengupta, 62, discovered the joys of alcohol only eight years ago. "If I hadn't discovered drinking," the illustrator tells his friends these days, "I wouldn't have known what I'm missing out." More and more Indians, hic, are saying just that.