Sunday 28 December 2014

Gold Monk


The faint music of the violin echoed on while the pretty waitresses meandered on nonchalantly across the length & breadth of the posh restaurant pouring wine & champagne to its bemused patrons. Tossing & turning his torso in his uncomfortable tuxedo, the billionaire ruminated his obscured memory or what was left of it, introspecting himself over & over again. Pondering over what drink he’d lost his alcoholic virginity to.

In this arena of golden couloured tantalising liquids incarcerated in shiny bottles, the intricate dilemma churning up inside his skull was but indisputable. There's nothing much you can say about it, is there? I've tried several times, but there's absolutely no way to distill into words the bliss you felt as that bitter-sweet ambrosia slithered its way down your throat and then made its fiery way up to your brain. His predicament was about falling in love, about being waylaid by the lusty charm of an expensive amber coloured seductress & about finding his way backward.

Having started off with Old Monk in his sophomore years, he had decided to move up the alcoholic ladder. Whisky, which seemed to be, for want of a better word, classier, was the obvious choice. After all, movies told us all that in every wealthy corporate office, there was a decanter of whisky, waiting to romance with cubes of ice in a crystal glass before being sipped, looked at and usually also commented upon appreciatively by the affluent boss and his equally affluent associates. Whisky was offered by the hero to a worthy villain, by the corrupt scoundrel to the honest officer. The sight of a decanter of whisky on a silver tray inspired beautiful women to raise an impressed eye-brow before proceeding to give in to the charm of the hero. Whisky was the drink to aspire to, as much as the iphone that is a phone to aspire to. In the televised world whether it’s the iphone or the whisky, the whole episode reeks of a lucrative marketing strategy.

Carried away by this not so obvious deceit, he gave into this marketing strategy as employed by the Mallyas of this world. Sip after sip he guzzled the drink by the gallons, he even formed a Whisky Drinkers' Club. He got drunk, he got caught by cops, he philosophised on roofs, he threw it all up, he collapsed on his deplorable bed in his deplorable room, he woke up with a hang-over cursing the sun, the retard who had made the drinking plan and himself for listening to that retard and the world at large.

During that brief period, he might, might even have called Old Monk- wait for it- "cheap liquor for the masses". Cheap liquor for the masses? He felt he should’ve just killed himself right there for that heresy.

I apologize, you can call me a plebeian but, to this day, I have not understood the world's fascination with whisky. I really cannot see what the fuss is all about. And neither did he. Whiskeys are pompously proclaimed to be deep or dark, with notes or a hint of this or that, to be full-bodied with a voluptuous texture and a fragrant, smoky finish. He felt like condemning any such description thrown at him as a consumer by the makers of the whisky to the corners of what he called ‘’The horseshit Realm’’. A realm that Old Monk has firmly refused to enter.

And thus was his brief, fleeting affair with whisky – permanently etched there on his alcoholic timeline. It shall forever remain there, a blot on the landscape of his romance with Old Monk. And all he could do about it is to do what I'm doing and explain why a cheap, bitter drink with no marketing strategy whatsoever and which is rumoured to be given to even horses became his drink of choice. 

With Old Monk, he’d savoured every moment- from buying the bottle, to talking about how cheap but awesome it was, to pouring it out into plastic glasses, to adding coke and a lime slice to taking the first gulp (a gulp, not a girly sip like whisky) to the anguish that accompanied the sight of the empty bottle. Oh, and also waking up with no hangover.

And, most of all, drinking Old Monk now took him back to those days when the only concern one had was to figure out how to spend all the free time one had. Old Monk made him feel young again. He could now feel the pulse of the boisterous high bossomed waitresses & bolstered up enough courage to dance with a few.

And that's why, even though there’s no doubt that he might have many more affairs with other drinks (after all, it is more probable that there might be something wrong with his taste buds than it is that the whole world is lying about how incredible whisky is), Old Monk would forever remain his drink of choice, the home ground he’d return to after playing enough away matches.

For, after all, there's no place like home