Busting the Popular Myths of Gujarat’s Prohibition

(This is a guest post I wrote for Repeal Prohibition: Life, liberty and beer in Gujarat!, an excellent blog on the subject anchored by Anirudh Singh Bhati, a law student in Gandhinagar, and a friend from high school.)

Myth: Pubs, bars and drinking are against Indian culture.

The consumption of alcohol and other intoxicants is as ancient as Indian culture itself. People of the Indus Valley were known to produce liquor by fermenting grains and fruits. The consumption of Soma by Hindu gods is spoken of in glowing terms in the Vedas. Drinking isn’t against Indian culture. It’s one of the elements constituting our highly nuanced way of life.

Myth: Prohibition saves people from alcoholism.

This is akin to saying that every smoker is a chain smoker, or every chocolate eater is chocoholic. The intemperance of a drinker mixed with other psychological traits lead to addiction. You don’t ban cars because some cause accidents. Most people don’t even own cars. Similarly for drinking, it’s pointless to demonise a harmless activity which some people indulge in.

Myth: Drinking is immoral and leads to crime.

The act of drinking itself is harmless. Millions of people drink billions of glasses of alcohol every day. They do not find the need to murder, steal, rape and arson. A huge majority of Indian states have not banned alcohol, and their citizens carry out the alcohol trade peacefully. So are all these millions of drinkers evil and immoral? Of course not.

Myth: Drinking ruins your health.

So does eating cheeseburgers and pizzas. Or smoking cigarettes. Chips, toast and beans can kill. But onlywhen consumed in all the wrong quantities. Drinking in moderation, it is known, can have health benefits. Moderate drinkers are known to have sturdier cardio-vascular health. They are also known to be better guarded against hypertension, dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Myth: Prohibition in Gujarat works.

It doesn’t. Alcohol is a thriving trade in Gujarat. Rediff.com says the trade was worth Rs 100 million in 2002. Kingshuk Nag, Times of India Ahmedabad’s editor, says the Gujarat government loses Rs 2,500 crores each year in excise duty by sustaining prohibition. Imagine the revenues and employment it can generate by repealing the monstrosity that is the Bombay Prohibition Act 1949.

In Ahmedabad, a phone-call to your local bootlegger would have your fix delivered to your doorstep in 30 minutes flat — only at two or three times the price it sells for in neighbouring states.

None of this money is accounted for. The trade thrives with the complicity of the underworld, police, politicians and bureaucrats, who, no doubt, get their “cut”.

Prohibition requires crores of taxpayer money to be diverted into enforcing a draconian law to keep people from the harmless act of enjoying a harmless drink.

Myth: Drinking ruins poor families.

If true, it’s another case to repeal prohibition. Refer to the hooch tragedy of July 2009, where more than 100 daily wage earners from Ahmedabad’s slums lost their lives. In the absence of watering holes, they’d turned to bootleggers, bought spurious liquor, and paid with their lives.

Myth: This is Gujarati/Gandhian culture, we want it thus.

Prohibition makes decent citizens behave like criminals. Period. We know alcohol is easily available in Gujarat. But why must you cower like criminals to procure it?

Mahatma Gandhi, a great man no doubt, stood by ideas of personal discipline and non-cooperation and non-violence to end British rule in India. But the British have gone home, and so must this silly law. As long as we let a nanny state tell us what to do with our lives, we can’t consider ourselves truly free.

I leave you a clip from the blog by Sauvik Chakraborty, titled Aspects Of Our “Common Loss”, which best sums up the situation:

Since bars are few and unaffordable in Delhi, most of the drinking goes on surreptitiously, in dark street corners, inside cars, in all kinds of shady places. Indeed, visit any sarkaari booze shop in Delhi and you will find, quite close to it, a private shop selling bottled water, soft drinks and plastic glasses. If you stick around the area for a while you will gather what is happening: ordinary people buy a “quarter” (180ml) bottle of some harsh grog, pick up water and a glass next door – and head for the nearest dark corner.

I joined a group of such happy drinkers in a dark corner some weeks ago. We all poured our drinks and I said “cheers” and took a small sip. All the other guys put their glasses to their mouths and did an incredible “bottoms up” – because they were too scared to hang around too long dithering over their drinks. No one wants to fall foul of the cops.

If anything, drinking in this manner is extremely uncivilized. We are expected to enjoy our drinks, sip them slowly, roll the fluid about the mouth and feel the taste. Enjoy! My companions in the dark corner did not enjoy their drinks at all. Their faces, after knocking back stiff harsh grogs in one shot, reflected great suffering rather than enjoyment. I felt sorry for them – and for their livers. And my hatred for the excisewallahs grew a lot stronger.

Comment away, even if you disagree with me, and we shall attempt to debate this like adults. In case you were wondering where I come from: I’ve had about five vodkas all my life and do not consider myself a drinker at all. But all around me are drinkers who’ve never murdered, stolen, raped or set buildings on fire.

Become a fan of Life, liberty and beer in Gujarat! on Facebook.

Tendulkar, Chennai, Hyderabad, 1999, 2009, Times of India, Plagiarism, Bakri and Gadha

I’ve followed cricket with great interest for most of my life, first as a fan and then as a journalist. Fans tend to get excited about teams, stars and results. But journalists become hardened cynics over a period of time. Sure, hacks love the game dearly, but without getting emotional about results. Win or lose, journalists have a job: to present cold, hard facts, and then perhaps analyse what went wrong or right.

But no matter how thick-skinned they are, a loss like the one at Hyderabad is a kick in the nuts. I’ll speak for myself. It hurts. Really bad.

Many of us have been discussing how Hyderabad 2009 is similar to Chennai 1999, when India lost to Pakistan by a gut-wrenching margin of 12 runs. In both cases, Tendulkar got a big hundred, raised hopes of a jail-breaking win, got out, and then the rest of the batting line-up had the tensile strength of a marie biscuit.

My colleague Arjun Sen first mentioned a possible similarity between 1999 and 2009, when we were discussing the match on my Facebook status.

I later thought it’d be worthwhile comparing the Chennai and Hyderabad scorecards to detect similarities. On top of my mind were 1) a Tendulkar hundred, 2) Nayan Mongia and Raina getting fifties and 3) a partnership of 130-odd runs in both games.

But once I began the analysis, the findings were startling. Eerie. Bizarre. Unbelievable. And mostly too good to be true. We suspected Chennai and Hyderabad were similar, but here was eye-popping data that confirmed our suspicion.

I ran the report on the findings on India Today an hour or so after the Hyderabad match.

Later, I updated the copy twice when I found some more eye-popping data from the two scorecards.

The story was picked up by In.com and later by Cricinfo’s Surfer.

Later this evening, blog buddy Arvind Iyer saw my report. My jaw dropped when he said he’d read something similar in the Bangalore edition of Times of India today.

So I looked up their epaper. And here’s what I find, on Sports Pg 1 .

Fantastic headline, and a five-star rating, too. (Update: Venkat Ananth points me to TOI’s Mumbai edition which carries the same infographic. I’m guessing this originated from Mumbai.)

Now, the connections between Chennai ’99 and Hyderabad ’09 have been talked about by thousands of cricket followers. I’m just one of them. And the stats which establish these connections are also out in public domain.

But what gets my bakri is the sequence of TOI’s points. They are exactly the same as the sequence in which I wrote them.

Without suggesting anything, I’ll just add that TOI & Sons are known offenders in such matters. Ask Twilight Fairy, The Cook’s Cottage, Food For Thought, Jai Arjun, to name a few. They’ve given bloggers a hard time, and now they’ve done it to someone of their own community.

I’ll leave it at that. I hope India kick Australia’s gadha tomorrow. There, I said it. It was an emotional outburst. But only because Hyderabad still hurts.

Striking gold at the Delhi Book Fair 2009

We were at Pragati Maidaan at the Book Fair last night and struck gold at the Diamond Publications stall.

We now own every Chacha Choudhary vs Raaka comic book — all 15 of them. Are we really cool dorks or what?

No, I’m not lending them to you!

Omkara Revisited

Please tell me this song isn’t about performing a BJ.

Vacationing In Tirupati, And What I Like & Dislike About Organised Religion

I’m wary of crowded places, hot weather and long queues.

Add ill-mannered security guards. And priests who’d make Atilla blush. Blend them, and you get Tirupati.

Yet I had to go. Family tradition. It’s something we do after marriage.

I kept pushing it away for two years. And then, the trip materialised and our family headed for the seven hills.

It was my sixth trip to the place. I don’t remember going to another holiday spot – religious or otherwise – as many times.

At first, there’s much to like about the place: the climate’s pleasant, the locales are clean and green, there’s spicy, piping hot, slurpacious Andhra food. And the datacard works too.

Then, the darshans happened.

There are several types of darshans you can make at Tirupati.

The cheapest option will leave you standing in queues several kilometres long. The slow, painful barefooted drag to the lord’s chamber takes many hours, sometimes more than a day.

Then, there’s the VIP queue, where you have to pay a higher-than-usual ticket price. But you are spared the queue and taken straight to the sanctum sanctorum.

Right before they reach the business end of the darshan, all these queues merge. Then, another wave from this sea of skinheads prepares to hit the lord’s chamber.

There, just as the devotees reach the chamber and get a second’s worth of his glimpse, they’re pushed away by the security – swiftly, rudely – to keep the queue moving.

All those hours in the sun.

For one second’s worth of darshan.

Two seconds, if you’re lucky.

Three, if you hold your ground and don’t let them push you.

It doesn’t stop there.

After this, people queue up again to make donations to the ginormous Tirupati hundi.

This queue is much shorter. But one thing doesn’t change: right after you’re done dropping your money in the hundi, the guard – probably fully aware that your donation helps pay his salary – pushes you away. All over again.

After this, you pass a gallery where overweight priests sit behind a glass wall with currency notes strewn around, waiting to be counted, or be pinched.

I’m an atheist. But what I truly like about organised religion is that it’s a fantastic, recession-proof, all-weather business model.

Its consumers fear abandoning it. Its proponents milk it for its dogmatic worth. And the product itself – The God – has irreproachable manners of pleasing or displeasing its followers.

My heated back-and-forth with some priests and guards would mean I’m not going back to any place of religion in a hurry.

However, if I can, I’m definitely going to set up a temple in every corner of the country.