Straight Face

Last week, the All India Brewers’ Association made it known through a memorandum to the government that beer is a much misunderstood drink. That, contrary to the popular view, imbibing quantities of lager conforms to the definition of “responsible drinking”. This, we can accept, responsibility being an entirely relative concept, but when these worthies went on to define beer as an essential key to general healthcare, incredulity was strained somewhat.

Beer, or so its manufacturers insisted, is an agri-food which is actually a “mild and healthy beverage”, redolent with the good things of life, including four vital minerals and Vitamin B, with just a piffling seven per cent alcohol content. The All Indian Brewers’Association would be glad to know that P.G. Wodehouse’s Uncle George would have heartily approved of their stand. He is believed to have discovered, much in advance of modern medical thought, that alcohol was a food and went on to prove it by downing large quantities of the golden beverage for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

India’s beer merchants, to clinch their case and get the government to allow them to advertise and market their product like a bar of soap or a cola, went on to perform a hit job on that benign substance that has undergirded human existence as we know it — milk. They firmly maintained that beer has more protein than a similar quantity of milk.

Indeed, short of defining milk as a dangerously alkaline drink, full of calories, which is addictive especially when introduced to consumers in their infancy, the brewers did their bit to sully the image of a food that has been sold to generations of babies as the safest substitute for ambrosia.

Now I have always believed that if a sufficientnumber of businessmen are convinced about the justness of their cause, there is very little that you or I can do to stop it from being peddled as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

If things carry on like this, there may well come an era some time in the brave new millennium that lies ahead when beer will actually be sold as a substitute for milk. Imagine paediatricians of the future advising new mothers to start their newborns on eight ounces of beer, eight or nine times a day, and gradually increase the quantity as they get older.

Imagine some future Dr Benjamin Spock coming up with valuable tips on how to deal with a colicky, sorry, alcoholiky baby, after she had downed a whole pint of beer. “The most important thing,” he would write, “is for the mother and father to recognize that the condition is fairly common in infants weaned on low-alcohol beer, and it doesn’t do any permanent harm. If parents can accept the occasional bouts of inebriation in their two-week-old in a fairlycalm and resigned way, the battle is half won. But never forget to burp the baby. Regular burping after each feed is crucial for the well-being of BBBs, or Babies Brought up on Beer.” Beer could then emerge, with some clever marketing, as the most acceptable liquid after water, with people referring to a prosperous nation as a land of beer and honey, where the beer of human kindness constantly flows and where people look up at the sky on a starry night and marvel at the splendour of the Beery Way.

All this may alarm those who have long advocated prohibition and abstinence from intoxicants as a way of life. But look at it this way. If beer becomes the preferred drink of choice for India’s thirsty millions, at least they won’t be able to water down the milk we buy from the local dairy with sewer water or pass a solution of detergent whitened with poster paint — as Uttar Pradesh’s diary mafia succeeded in doing only a few weeks ago — as the real thing. If it is a choice between lager and milk that lathers,most people I suspect will plumb for the beer.