Just One Drink: Is India Facing A Rising Menace Of Binge-Drinking?

It’s disheartening how quickly and grotesquely success dissolves into defeat. As the master of the Indian fabric and fantasy breathing his last, it struck me how Rohit Bal was once on the top of his game. Since the last few years, he has reportedly been struggling with alcohol addiction and was in and out of rehab. In one of the interviews in 2015, he mentioned that he is drinking. Because after all the hard work, one should celebrate. He was self-made man in the profoundest sense of the term, learnt his craft from one of the most premium fashion institutes of India. It's disheartening how people get caught up in a circle of deterioration, while they live in a unique hell where they know they are done but they are not over as yet.

The cookie-cutter approach to having a good time nowadays is to have a drink. We live by “Work Hard Party harder” and unwittingly parties have to collaborate with drinks. From social get togethers to office events, to farewell, to friends get together from old friends and new, to freshers’ parties, from a chilled Budweiser in summers to Old Monk in winters and every season in between – a drink is a must.

Why Knowing When To Stop Is Important

Drinking is ingrained in the social glue and it sticks every occasion together. Some people drink in order to start feeling something or stop feeling something. Others drink in search of happiness or in search of a lifestyle that gives them happiness. Some drink to numb out anxiety, pain, memory or trauma. Others drink to celebrate life. Everyone has a valid reason to enjoy a drink or two.

There’s a popular joke about Gurugram, you know you are in Gurugram when there is a liquor shop every half a kilometre. There were about 60 liquor shops in Gurgaon in 2013, and more than 150 liquor shops in 2023. The exponential increase is an indication that the total volume of alcohol consumed per year has increased 70 percent between 1990 to 2017.

Common misconception about drinking is that there are two types of drinkers; one who are at the rock bottom and are dependent on alcohol and then there are social drinkers and people who have reached at a level where they can flaunt the fancy-exotic-aged-aspirational brands of alcohol and their drinking appetite too.

So, what’s the big deal?

1) The research, using a dataset of more than 36,000 adults, revealed that going from one to two drinks a day was associated with changes in the brain equivalent to ageing two years.

2) For women, 6 drinks a week can increase the risk of breast cancer by 40 percent.

3) Alcohol consumption leads to an increase in the cases of domestic violence leading to divorces by 30 percent. (National Library of Medicine)

4) More than 3 million people died as a result of harmful use of alcohol in 2016, according to a report released by the World Health Organization (WHO) today. This represents 1 in 20 deaths. More than three quarters of these deaths were among men.

If you have lost someone to alcohol, you have seen them tied to the noose of alcohol indispensability. This kind of obsession is insatiable. It all starts casually, no one minds a drink when you are on cloud nine or getting rejected and attaining depths of despair then there is the legit midlife crisis. There would always be a reason to drink more. The energy it creates is combustible. The time when you wrap your head around what’s happening to you and your life, you are already in the thick of it. 

A mess of this magnitude was not created in a day. We turned a blind eye to passing out on the couch, hangovers that were ridiculous, debilitating levels of energy. That shit of dancing on the table was fun and it would always be unless you start slurring your words, in your head you can’t have a good time without alcohol, not having a drink makes you stressed and hyperventilate. Eventually, it spirals into a sense of no self-worth, get caught in DUI, lose friendships, ostracised by your own people because nobody wants to hang around with people who can’t hold a drink and make a clown of themselves and embarrass people associated with them. If your mature self cannot handle the thrall of temptation to drink and you fall for it in juvenile excitement then it's time you step back and assess the situation.

Both at conscious and subconscious level people are fearful about other drugs, illegal drugs. Not knowing that alcohol is one of the substances that will kill you, if you don’t draw a line to it. There are considerably more people who die of alcohol abuse than for marijuana. A tiny proportion of people can quit anything on their own. Only 10 percent of people suffering from alcohol seek treatment because alcohol is not just addictive but seductive. Your heart will struggle not to allow itself to be seduced but it lowers the resistance of even the strongest will. The stigma, shame and lack of awareness around it do not let people seek early intervention.

The way forward is to not wait until addiction ruins your life or the life of your loved ones and stop glamorizing social and binge drinking.  

Step down the booze elevator before it hits the rock bottom. 

Authored by Radhika Dhingra.