A Dry Kerala? What the Fuck!

I don't know how this happened and when it happened. I guess, it kind of caught us unaware. There was always these ominous signs, which on hindsight, we should have paid attention to. But like the frog in a pot of water that is being brought to a boil, we did not realize it until we lost everything.

We surrendered without a fight. Somehow even the thought of a resistance was sabotaged by the media and the oppressors , by making us into the enemy. We were the disease. This was being done to cure us. Our rights were stripped away over night.

This was a black day and we could not even drink to that.

To think this could happen in my own , nay, God's own country!

True, a mallu like his peg. Okay we like it a lot.

It offers him the necessary numbness to actually live with being a mallu. Its hard being a mallu. Its like being a black Jew.

I for one, thinks this is a bad idea. You are dealing with a bunch of people who are some of the smartest in the Indian Nation. We even have one of our boys going on that one way trip to Mars. Okie, we are not that smart. But we are devious. You can never tell a mallu to do something or not do something. Terms cannot be dictated to a Keralite. It doesnt go down well with us.

"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in our toddy shops
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Bars, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight in the Parliament,
we shall fight in the paddy fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender,
and even if we do, which I do not for a moment believe; and this prawn state or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our NRIs beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the Foreign exchange, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the Bars, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the drunks.”

I have kept quite when the prawn state declared the law against smoking in public places. I felt that it was a justified law. After all those who disagree must consider that smoking in a public place is like peeing in the pool, its gets around.

But closing the bars and declaring a prohibition is stepping on my constitutional right. Its my fucking money, my fucking liver, my fucking life and if I want to drink , I should be allowed to. The day I want the government to become my wife, I will ask them to get into the ring and go a round with my wife.

Look, I get the whole problem with alcoholism. I have seen, as many of us, people who have died of it, the domestic violence due to it, the accidents that are caused by it ( Salman Bhai, take a bow), the late night texting to the exes and the regrettable status updates on facebook. Alcoholism is a serious problem. I get it.

But like a wise monk once said, if the thorns hurt your feet, the solution is not in covering the whole world in leather but rather your soles in it.

The cure for alcoholism is not in prohibition. That will drive the problem underground. You really think you can keep a mallu away from his alcohol? These are the guys who runs lucrative bootlegging trade in moonshine, in Saudi Arabia, which has the strictest penalty against alcohol and its use. My friends are already surfing the net to study making home made mead.

Our Kerala politicians are the most entertaining folks there is. They are the ones who keep the whole of Kerala glued to the TV ,watching Asianet, ignoring the fact that a whole world exists beyond Kerala, Nammade nadu. If they did, they would learn some amount of history which will show what happened when this stunt was pulled in other countries.

This is the same stunt, which costed a horse its head and enabled Italian men in great suits to make offers that no one could refuse.

I don't do politics. I don't understand it and I don't follow it. But every once in a while, one of them goes and does something so stupid that, I will have to switch the channel to Asianet, where I get to to see fat men in white, indistinguishable from each other, talking in a Malayalam which is never really in common conversation. This Malayalam is pompous, incomprehensible and reeks of insincerity. The plan now I hear is to encourage all persons who partakes to rehabilitation. The help of the police is being sought to enforce this. But first they will ensure that the tipplers among the police are rehabilitated and made into teetotalers.

By this time I got off from the floor , where I was rolling around trying hard to control my laughter.

Now I understood why my fellow mallus were glued to this channel to see the antics of these walruses all dressed in white. They are fucking hilarious.

So the plan, in short, is a police state, with moral policing.

Having spend a life time battling addictions, allow me to give you a realistic insight into the dark recesses of a person who take solace in substance abuse. Though this prohibition move effects even the sensible drinkers among us, it is being touted as the concerned step taken by the government to help stem alcoholism.

We need help.

But not this kind of help. You take away an addicts source, he will replace it with another addiction. Once that void has been experienced , you will tend to try and fill it. Every time. We are like zombies. We keep going. The only way, we can climb out of this hole , we have helped dig, is a want to quit. The change , the need for it, has to come from within.

What needed to have been done was an awareness drive. More rehabilitation centers. More AA meetings. Support groups for those who needed help. Counselling.

In the meantime, come down hard on domestic violence. Enforce those laws on drunken driving, mercilessly. Drunken public nuisance should not be tolerated. Enforce and implement the laws that are already in place.

So while the politicians berate about the loss of revenue in excise taxes and the bar owners make noises about their licenses and the bar employees mourn about their jobs, the real problem, is going to find ways to sustain itself.

And Kerala has all the resources necessary to find a way around this.

My suggestion is to have a breath analyzer test for all those politicians when they enter the parliament. I feel that will give an idea how sincere anyone of these guys are about the welfare of their people.

Be the change that you want to see around you.

This is not a good trend. Allow this and tomorrow the government will dictate your life. Remember these are the same clowns who think that rape is caused due to what women wear.

Just a thought.