The thing with Booze

And why it's so hard to let go

18 December, 2022

It was the night of the Football World Cup final and I was catching up with some school friends. After two rounds of beers, someone realized that one of our friends, R, was still sipping on his first drink.

‘C’mon! Drink up man. We are done with two already!’

‘Oh, don’t wait for me’, said R. ‘I am just having this one beer.’

‘Oh but why?’

R looked at me and smiled slightly.

‘Remember that night we attended A’s cousin’s wedding?’

‘Wait, what?!’

That was some two decades back when we were still in college.

And the big reason for us to go to our friend’s cousin’s wedding without ever having met that cousin before was that there would be an open bar.

The rituals at the wedding went on late into the night and we were too young to know when to stop drinking.

By the end of the night, we were in no state to walk and we had a car to take back with us.

I drove us out of the near empty parking lot quite easily and then we got a roundabout at the junction and so I went around it once, twice, three times…

I was falling asleep and my friend R says he hesitated before calling out to me because he was scared that I might wake up with a start and lose control of the car.

I now shuddered imagining the mortal fear he must have felt throughout those 15-20 minutes it must have taken for us to somehow get home.

Two decades later, R still remembers it all so clearly. He shared with us that the very next morning, he stood under the shower and decided never to put himself through this again.

The morning after the World Cup final was both joyful because my favourite team had lifted the cup, and, hurtful because of the same old hangover which had been getting worse in recent years.

Plus, there was also that discomfort that I had felt the previous night.

The discomfort was about how, that one crazy night in 2002 had messed up my friend R so badly that he quit drinking altogether (except the occasional one drink) whereas, for me, it was one among the many nights where things went awry but I managed a lucky escape with a story to tell.

My college friend S wasn’t that lucky.

After we finished college, S found a good job, got married young and became a father soon after. One night while driving to his hometown, he crashed into a truck and didn’t make it. 

None of us friends dared to ask the question we all had on our minds.

 When I got a chance to meet a common friend, V, I finally asked him.
'Yes, he had had some drinks. But it was another friend who was driving', said V.
'And that guy survived', he added after a pause.

We were both were at a seaside bar having beers in the afternoon.

Urban Dictionary defines Drunk Logic as: the cognitive process an extremely inebriated individual uses when they choose to do something very strange or stupid.

October 2017

It is very late in the night when we step out of the bar. I realise my feet are not striding firmly. I take it slow and straighten my back while taking a deep breath. I look back at my friends who are all just as drunk but they don't need to straighten up and take deep breaths as they don't have to drive the car.  Since it’s my car, it’s understood that I have to drive them home. It’s only 10 km on a highway and I’ve done it a thousand times. It is said that a drunk person will be fine once they hold the steering wheel in their hands. I roll down my side of the window to let in the early winter chill that will keep me awake. Everything is going well for the first few kilometers until I realize nothing is really helping. I am feeling drowsy and I slow down further and further until we are going at 20-30km per hour on the highway at 2 am. I wish I could stop the car and splash some water on my face but I decide against it. Firstly, everyone else is asleep and once I stop the car, someone else will offer to drive the car and we will get into an unnecessary discussion. It’s bloody frustrating talking sense with drunk people. Also, in these situations, I take it upon myself to get us home.

Not knowing how else to stay awake, I close my right fist and bite into my knuckles hard enough for the pain to travel through the nervous system and keep the drowsiness from overpowering my brain.

When I was finally in the comfort of my bed, I promised myself never to do that again - drinking and driving.

*

I applied drunk logic even while dealing with the habit.

For a while, I thought I could soften the hangovers by limiting my intake to just the one drink, okay maybe two.

But then I realized there was a benefit to letting loose on some nights. So I came up with binge-or-nothing.

For about five years, I was yo-yoing between different ways to keep up with the habit.

*

2023 was when I finally enrolled into writing workshops.

I was giddy with excitement to be doing what I had wished to do for years. And these workshops were also empowering because I realized that I didn’t have to turn back the clock and study Literature in undergrad to become a writer.

I was already juggling with work life, personal life and social life. And now I was starting to live a writing life.

During that time, I once lost an entire Sunday because I just could not recover from a hangover. I had planned to finish a writing assignment that day. From feeling sorry for myself, I began to feel disappointed with myself for losing precious time coping with hangovers instead of doing something that I had always wanted to do.

How badly do I want this writing life?

After that, I started to avoid gatherings for months and used all my free time for reading and writing. When the finals of Cricket World Cup came up, I allowed myself to go out with my friends. It was a Sunday night and I was keeping it cool with small gin drinks. I might have shifted gears had the game veered in India’s favour. Luckily for me, that didn’t happen. But I still got up with a small little unnecessary headache the Monday morning.

Finally, on 20 November 2023, I realized I need to stop drinking altogether.

No more strategizing and tricking myself into submission.

I will soon complete one year of staying sober – a first in my entire adult life.

*

I had been off alcohol for six months already when I read about the Porsche car accident in Pune. But I still felt a chill down my spine.

The thing with booze is that we don’t drive to a bar thinking we will get drunk out of our senses. It so happens that after two drinks, we stop counting because we are unable to count anymore. Every sober person can see it but the alcohol in our bloodstream tells us that we are perfectly fine and everything we say and do is making sense – but it is making sense only to our fogged brains and others who are also drunk like us. It is because of the booze that we don’t realize how much our responses are getting weaker and weaker making us increasingly unfit to drive a car.

But then, drunk logic tells us that we have done this many times before and driving a short distance is no big deal.

One wrong move and it could have been me.

*

It took over five years since I started thinking of quitting, and then strategizing, and finally ending my uneasy relationship with alcohol.

During this year, I have been thinking of why it took so long for me to completely stop even after I had stopped enjoying it.

I could see two major forces that are extremely difficult for us to overcome: Drinking Culture and Groupthink.

Drinking Culture

While I was in 11^th grade at the boarding school, six of us seniors used to sit at the table for our meals. There used to be a plastic jug of water and six steel glasses. Before starting the meal, one of us would pour water into the glasses and one of us would always ensure that the water in each glass at the same level - nothing more, nothing less. And then we would all pick up our glasses and clink them to one another and say cheers! before taking a sip. Right after the first sip, we would all react in dramatic ways:

Too strong uh today

Just the perfect drink da

That was smoooooth

And then there’s that reaction my friend used to make by smacking his lips and saying - something’s not right with this one but I can’t say what. And we would all crack up!

This is what we had observed our fathers and uncles do.

I know families where the custom is that when the son starts earning his own money, he also earns the right to sit with his father for an evening drink. And he won’t have to hide about his drinking habit anymore.

I can’t come up with a single memory of hanging out with other men at malls, restaurants, or amusement parks - where there was no booze involved. We have travelled upto mountains, sailed to islands, trekked through forests – but never without our bottles. The bar is the natural habitat for groups of men like us – where we get table service, finger snacks and a washroom.

There is also the wider pop-culture of cinema, music and sports (Australian for beer!) that makes drinking hugely aspirational for young people. And a rite of passage for many young boys.

Groupthink

I have always been a homebody and many times my friends had to convince me to step outside and join them at the bar.

In my 20s, I would get calls and texts like this –

It was such a boring day at work, let’s catch up at the bar.  

A has broken up, we have to sit with him at the bar.

N has got a new job, let’s celebrate at the bar!

I think you need a drink, meet me at the bar.

The drink had become an antidote to sadness, a cure for sleeplessness, a companion for loneliness, essential for celebrations and even a remedy for cold.  

Urban Dictionary defines Groupthink as:  A phenomenon in which all or most individuals in a group align to the same opinion or moral standing, regardless of its validity or their personal agreement with it. Most commonly caused by an internal desire to not stand out from the whole.

We are of course wired to conform and fit into our tribes. And every time we stray, we have gatekeepers who tell us how disappointed they are with us – You will at least have a beer, right? 

So we try everything to conform to the group even if it means putting ourselves in misery.

*

Apart from my wellbeing, thinking of drinking and nursing hangovers as time lost has helped me in becoming firm with my decision to stay off liqour.¹

I am writing this mostly for the reader who has also tried to quit drinking. You don’t have to feel like a loser because you haven’t been able to stop. The forces of culture and groupthink are too overpowering for one individual to stand up to.

It’s okay.

I am sure you will do it when you can do it.

1. Even hangovers are romanticized in pop-culture. There is the famous line from Die Hard: with a Vengeance (1995) where the John McClane (Bruce Willis) says ‘You’re fucking up a perfectly good hangover’.