Booze Nation

By Ranjan Yumnam *

There are times when we think only God and alcohol can save us from the personal worries that we all face in life. The God part may be right depending on whether you are a believer or not; but considering alcohol as our salvation is a misguided perception and it all boils down to that neat excuse to drink, come what may. This is not a new earthshaking discovery; we all know that the best policy is to abstain from alcohol. Like all good advice, this too, only a few follow it, while the majority is literally drowned in the spirits.

Started out as a social lubricant in social gatherings, liquor has now gained cult status. From funerals to birthdays, drinks have become compulsory to mourn or celebrate, as the case may be. And any social event that has no drinks flowing in it is considered tame and boring and the organisers are dubbed outdated morons. Get a life, we want to tell them.

Now look at the irony. Alcohol deprives you of life, the real life. The claim that alcohol is a stress buster is as slippery as the glass that is used to drink it. The more apt appreciation of partaking liquor is the placebo effect it has on a person. An inebriated person assumes a different persona with I-don't-care attitude that is akin to the Ostrich reaction towards adversities of life, ie, by ducking the real problem. Instead of addressing the root cause of a problem, drinking postpones taking a hard decision and lulls a person into a false sense of security.

All these harmful effects of hard drinks on a person's mental and physical well-being are well documented and I need not labour too much to rehash them here. What is interesting is the behaviour of the booze guzzling Manipuri crowd. We, the Manipuris, have a peculiar way with drinks that exposes us to heightened risk of its undesirable side-effects. First, we eat a lot of unhealthy food with drinks. To imbibe a few shots, we will cook god-knows-how-many pounds of meat. We throw the concerns of excess calories or fat to the wind and by the time we have taken a few rounds, our stomach would have been already full with the damn motley junk of salad, coke and meat. I am saying this because I have never seen any outsider taking drinks with as much elaborate and gargantuan menu that we so much care to arrange for before a drinking session. For them, papad, bhujiya, nuts or other light snacks in miniscule quantities are enough to consume any amount of liquor. The difference is: they eat to drink; we drink to eat. No wonder, most drinkers in Manipur are overweight from the useless calories that liquor contains and from the accompanying oily food.

This tendency of overeating while boozing also leads to another problem--that of inability to set limits to how much you should drink. Two to three standard size shots are fine but beyond that life becomes hell for yourself and others. But when you see so much tempting chicken breast before you like a mountain on a plate, you tend to go for another round just for the sake of partaking the food. Then it is a matter of time before the self-imposed leash gets out of control and your sanity falls into a tail-spin. The tongue gets loose; you will hit out at people; say and do things which you would have never contemplated under normal circumstances; all ending in making a fool of yourself and regretting for those silly gaffes you committed, the day after.

After food, what makes us intoxicated over the board is the availability of free drinks. There are too many social occasions in Manipur where drinks are expected to be offered to the guests. Now we have co-opted even the religious celebrations for giving ourselves a kick. In a way, it can be said that society has also forced us to become drunkards and those who are not, we call them the homos, the unsocialised jerks and many more choicest adjectives and nouns--partly to justify our own weakness and cover up our guilt.

Manipuri society has become a highly toxic one. We don't have avenues for healthy recreation and for letting our hair down even once in a while. Tell me which place in Manipur is safe for outing and having a nice time with friends and families? Safety is our number one concern and we think our life is secure behind closed doors. The question is, how many things can we do inside our fortified hideout--hardly any, other than turning to wining, dining and sinning.

The fear psychosis created by the prevailing law and order situation, the general feeling of doom and the real deprivation on all fronts have made ours a society addicted to alcoholic painkillers. It has affected all walks of life and disrupted the normal course of our activities. For instance, fear of the bombs and bullets has weighed in on all of us even in the way we design our house. Architects have discarded their best glass-intensive modern designs in favour of iron grills. House owners in Manipur do not want elegance; they want protection from stray ricocheting objects for their lives even if the house looks like a grotesque structure, suffocating and cramped. That is Manipur where the head is held sideways looking for an escape route -- sorry Rabindranath dada.

Whatever it is, I don't want to justify drinking for the obvious reasons. If we are not abstaining, it's our weakness. Period. Don't blame others. A person has to resist the societal pressure to fall in the fuddled line if she has to remain a teetotaller standing on the moral high ground. There are two effective ways to tackle the problem of dipsomania and they are simple. First, avoid free drinks offered at social gatherings. Second, make your resolution public. I just did.

Ranjan Yumnam

* Ranjan Yumnam, presently an MCS probationer, is a frequent contributor to e-pao.net. He can be contacted at ranjanyumnam(at)gmail(dot)com. This article was webcasted on September 15, 2009.