| Her husband is not without skills. He is a fairly decent carpenter who, when he does a good day's work, easily earns Rs 200. But he does not work all days and when he does, his family gets to see little of his earnings which are mostly spent on drinking. This is a familiar enough story. What makes Selvi's a little different is that she is also a high-spirited woman. Periodically, after her husband has gone through a particularly severe bout of drunkenness, she takes her children and goes to live with her parents. |
| They are not well off either. Her father, aided by her mother, is the local presswalla on the street where we lived earlier. Her parents, two unmarried brothers and one unmarried sister live in two rooms. How they, Selvi and her five children manage to live in two rooms when Selvi leaves her husband, I cannot imagine. After Selvi has made her point and her husband is suitably penitent "" he loves the children and really misses them "" Selvi goes back to her own single room home, to re-enact the whole cycle till her husband becomes impossible and she again leaves for her parents'. |
| Among major Indian metros, Bangalore has the least hangups over drinking. Its liquor shops are well laid out and its pubs are supposed to be famous. But what sets the city apart is the way in which the law is broken by liquor shops where mostly working people drink standing at the counters when the shops have no licence to serve drinks. Autorickshaw drivers and the like typically come in between fares or chores for quickies, downed from quarter bottles, and then get on with their work. |
| Over time I have realised that alcoholism among the poor in Bangalore is rampant in a way in which it is not in, say, Kolkata and Mumbai. The micro-finance institution Ujjivan which works among the city's poor corroborated my visual impression. When they first asked their customers what else they needed other than loans, the reply was ""do something about the drinking among our men folk. |
| With psychiatric help from Nimhans, the famous neuro science research institute in the city, they organised a couple of deaddiction centres which proved to be hugely popular. Social drinking is also prevalent and a slum on a Sunday morning will have many with a night's drinking behind or a day's drinking ahead. Some women also will drink a bit during the weekend but this is far different from the alcoholism among men. |
| I have all my life upheld the virtues and joys of social drinking. The culprit which, I have held, has done more harm than good is prohibition or severe moral disapproval of even casual drinking. When there was prohibition in what were then Madras or Bombay, I had found more drunks on their streets than in Calcutta which was as 'wet' as you could get. |
| But the situation in Bangalore is different. The easy attitude to drinking in the city travels right up the social ladder. When I expressed my surprise about people beginning to drink from 10 am onwards off liquor shop sales counters to a bigwig in a leading city beer and spirits firm, he didn't seem very bothered. He recalled that when he was younger he would think nothing of starting on the beer not very much after 11 am in preparation for lunch. |
| If I were a social worker in Bangalore I would demand an end to drinking off shop counters, make liquor shops and bars open not before 12 noon and ask everyone to recognise there was a serious problem of alcoholism among the poor. I am not a believer in class remedies of social problems but I get the feeling that drinking is a dangerous habit which is best kept away from poor people. The joys of casual drinking are something only the rich should be able to afford. |
Top Section
Explore Business Standard