There was a special kick in the afternoon vodka I had at home this October 2.

Some of the head-buzz I got was derived from the pleasure of reading the relevant chapter on birthday boy Lal Bahadur Shastri in Ramachandra Guha’s magisterial India After Gandhi. Guha’s across-the-table prose describing Jawaharlal Nehru’s successor in the prime ministerial seat – “Harry Truman… to [Nehru’s] Franklin Delano Roosevelt”; his handling of the resurrection of the anti-Hindi agitations; his un-Nehru-like decisiveness during the 1965 war against Pakistan (“he was happy to be photographed – dhoti and all – atop a captured Patton tank, a gesture that would not have come easily to his predecessor”) – played its part in my brain being enveloped by the soft lights. There is, after all, a special pleasure reading about Shastri on Shastri Jayanti, a day that gets gobbled up by another man’s birthday celebrations.

But I’m pretty certain a large part of the happy lightheaded feeling I was bathing in had to do with the intake of alcohol. And chugging on my vodka on a “dry day”, I wondered, in the pure spirit of inquiry, why we have dry days in the first place. The answer, of course, lies in three high-pitched words: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Shastri, being a Gandhian himself, was a teetotaler. But it was Gandhi who was the teetotalitarian.

It was this lingering teetotalitarianism that led us to a strange, infantile and guilt-ridden relationship with alcohol that marks its presence to this day with foreign dignitaries forced to toast with apple juice, politicians never wanting to be seen in public with a glass of the good stuff, and bars and drinking places being “dens of vices” each time something untoward happens in their vicinity. (I’m yet to hear an ashram being forced to close early because some disciple was molested by a guruji.)

In the June 8, 2012 edition of Young India in 1921, the 51-year-old MKG wrote:

“You will not be deceived by the specious argument that India must not be made sober by compulsion and that those who wish to drink must have facilities provided to them. The state does not cater for the vices of its people. We do not regulate or license houses of ill fame. We do not provide facilities for thieves to indulge their propensity for thieving and perhaps even prostitution… I ask you to join the country in sweeping out existence of drink revenue and abolishing the liquor shops. Many liquor-sellers would gladly close their shops, if the money paid by them were refunded.”

With such finger-wagging from the FoN (Father of the Nation), I guess we non-teetotalers should all thank our lucky stars that India didn’t turn out to be the largest Prohibition Country in the world. But instead of a ban, we have the duck-your-head-for-a-quick-pranaam gesture of dry days. Unlike the FoN, however, who took what his mother, the GroN (Grandmother of the Nation), said to heart when he promised her in the presence of a Jain monk to never drink alcohol before setting off to Britain to study law, many of us – Gandhi’s eldest son Harilal included – went the other direction.

Instead of being attuned to the genteel charms of “social drinking” through family gatherings over drink, drinking has held dangerous, illicit anti-social possibilities that can be as inviting as sleeping behind a wheel. What the FoN didn’t reckon with when he – like most middle-class urban dadajis and nanijis – compared bars or drinking establishments to brothels is that this description would be exactly what would make these very places more appealing.

Unlike Gandhi, I do enjoy drinking in public places, being among the more-lively-than-usual crowds that a poet once described as humming with “an enormous reservoir of electricity”. And the dry day, however infrequent it may be, denies me the choice of that very experience. (Incidentally, the GroN had said nothing about abstaining from dancing, so the young MKG took some six dancing lessons in London.)

But then, a nanny State aka Maa-Baap State by definition doesn’t treat its citizens as adults. All citizens are treated as children who need to be protected from all kinds of vices (adult content on television included). So, refilling my glass, I opened the website of the Delhi government’s Department of Excise – Department of Excise, Entertainment and Luxury Tax, to give its full, official name – to find out what parental tone the government maintained regarding the consumption of alcohol.

And surprise, surprise, I found it to be quite mature about the whole thing. There were just a few stentorian dos and don’ts about booze that included:

* No licensee shall employ any person suffering from an infectious or contagious disease. (Do TB and HIV count?)

* If one is travelling to Delhi from outside the state, one should not possess more than one unsealed liquor bottle of 750 ml. (Is carrying a half-empty 1 litre bottle a problem?)

* No person shall permit or publish in any newspaper/book/leaflet matter soliciting the use of or offering any liquor. (Are the novels lovingly depicting heavy drinking, Devdas by Saratchandra Chattopadhyay and The Rum Diary by Hunter Thompson, a problem?)

* Consumption of liquor is injurious to health. (What about all that news about one glass of wine being good for the heart?)

The rest of the excise information was pretty much about facts, regulations and rules rather than a moral outpouring that would have been the case if the FoN had been checking up.

“Liquor is a liquid intoxicant, deriving its intoxicating potency from the ethyl alcohol in it. Liquor can be divided into three broad categories, namely Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL), Beer and Country Liquor”, the excise page helpfully and tastefully says without judgment, even as it didn’t really explain what the drink I had bought from the neighbourhood alco shop was. (It was not IMFL, beer or liquor. It was Absolut 100 vodka with the words “Bonded liquor” and “For sale in Delhi only” on the small label pasted to the bottle.)

So despite the gestures of dry days – not too dissimilar to my gestures of not smoking in front of my in-laws – India, it seemed to be, isn’t that neurotic after all about alcohol consumption and alcohol consumers.

Thanks to a list on the excise department website, I even got to know “Real India” drinks under the country liquor roster that I hope to procure and try tasting very soon. I mean, once you know about Shokeen, Kinnu, Murthal No. 1, Hulchal, Metro, Lal Qila, Litchi No. 1, wouldn’t you want to try them?

“Experience has shown that the moral and physical gain of the abstainer more than makes up for the loss of this tainted revenue [from excise taxes]”, wrote Gandhi in the September 21, 1947 edition of Harijan, adding, “If we eradicate the evil, we will easily find other ways and means of increasing the nation’s income”. Sixty-two years after Gujarat was made a dry state in a symbolic nod to the FoN’s well-meant but whimsical concern, 136 people in the state died from alcohol poisoning after consuming illicit liquor.

Any right-thinking person – drinker or teetotaller – would certainly prefer the practical, pragmatic and safe outlet that India’s excise department allows and indeed encourages to an MKG-inspired ban that helps bootleggers who don’t have any accountability about safety of what they’re making and selling under the table in the name of a cheap, quick high.

So even as I understand the dippy “show of contrition” that are dry days (a dry day on Shivratri is a bit rich), I suggest we turn October 2 into a day where we at least celebrate the little joys of drinking at home with family. And while we’re pouring our mothers and fathers and uncles and aunties and spouses and (above 16) kids a celebratory nip, we could quietly raise a toast to Lal Bahadur Shastri as a roundabout way of showing how we all have matured from seeing all drinkers as degenerate rogues to being what they should be: tipplers having a good time without guilt.

Image Source – http://www.flickr.com/photos/drbeachvacation/2718635127/