SWIGGIN’ JANES

With drinking no longer taboo for middle class urban Indian women, they’re imbibing it with much spirit drinking! “I love dancing when I’m drinking! Dancing when you are sober is just not the same!” exclaimed a female friend of mine. Another chirped “I love how the music gets into you,and your body sort of sways with the music. Drinking makes me happy,chatty and uninhibited.” These friends of mine are one of the thousands of urban middle class Indian women who head to a bar a couple of times every week,to wind down with a drink after a hard day’s work,or pass the night in a hedonistic blur of potent cocktails and shots. Fuelled with their new financial independence and the increasing social tolerance of women’s drinking, more urban women are drinking than before. They might begin their drinking careers with innocuous-tasting Baileys and breezers;comforting the sweet confections which, nevertheless, contain hard spirits. But they soon move on to undisguised and unabashedly stiffer drinks-whisky,vodka,gin.

What’s even more appaling is, more than half the number of women who drink are “binge drinking” – putting the drinks away as fast and furiously as their male counterparts. At most parties, when everybody agrees that one’s level of merriment is measured in direct proportion with the number of drinks they’ve downed, binge drinking becomes almost a social obligation. It’s a daunting challenge to persistenly sidestep your hosts’ outraged cries of “Where’s your drink?” Neither does it win you any admirers. Another female colleague of mine has reserved her most scathing contempt for teetotalers. “Why would you come to a pub and then not drink? That’s boring!” she declares. “You risk being labelled a moralistic tightass, unable to relax. At such parties and get-togethers, sober people don’t fit in.”
It isn’t the same environment anymore, not by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a world where the spectacle of a tipsy woman tottering on high heels isn’t confined to a Bollywood allegory of fallen virtue, but a sight so common now that it no longer raises an eyebrow. Where girls nursing pounding hangovers outdo one another with tales of how cataclysmically ‘wasted” they got the previous night. Where the mid-week ‘Ladies night’ orgy of free cocktails has become the riguer in any watering hole aspiring to be the next it-bar. And with a quarter of the Indian alcohol industry’s 15 % annual market growth being fuelled by women,liquor companies are constantly diversifying their arsenal to make sure women don’t stray away from the bar. Advertising their wares might be banned, but this does not stop them from sponsoring exactly the sorts of events that attract hip young women - rock concerts,club nights,parties-to sample newly launched liqueurs,breezers and pre-packaged shots. For the increasing number of women with the social sanction and disposable incomes to have access to this beguiling array of booze,it’s hard to stop at just one or two.

Well, it’s a strange world we live in these days and even stranger the people we interact with. But I guess the men folk will agree that there’s nothing more sexy than a woman sippin’ on a drink in a bar. Its an equally colossal turn off to watch a pretty face get wasted in an array of alcoholic spirits. So whatever the reason for drinking, watch your step ladies, ‘coz its quite slippery down where the road to “spirit villa” leads. But for now I’m off to the bar to watch some pretty young faces down their drinks almost with a vengeance and see them shed their inhibitions and dance…..till then Adios amigos & senoritas….