Weekend Wild Card: From happy hour to hard times as liquor prices skyrocket

This isn't just economic policy—it’s a war on joy, on rose-coloured spectacles.

Have you heard the sad news? No, not the horrific air crash, that is a terrible tragedy. I’m referring to the other blow we received this week---the Maharashtra government’s devastating hike in excise duty on alcohol by as much as 60 percent. It’s a surgical strike on the state’s tipplers.

Let us consider—while still sober—the catastrophic consequences. What keeps your average worker chained to his joyless, dead-end job for 12 hours a day? What fortifies the brave souls packed into Mumbai’s trains like sardines? The thought of a glass of booze at day’s end, and for those who live large, maybe a bottle over the weekend.

That quiet, sacred drink is both an incentive and reward. Sure, there are better things in the world than alcohol. But as Terry Pratchett pointed out, ‘alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them’. And now, the state has chosen to hike the tax on that fleeting solace, our consolation against the angst of an absurd existence, a means to forget the pointlessness of a life that includes planes falling from the sky and killing youngsters sitting down for lunch.

Imagine the fallout of this sadistic move: millions of grumpy, dry workers stumbling into offices with despair in their veins. Productivity will nosedive. Morale will sink. A worker sipping his country liquor could once aspire to go up in life slowly but surely to IMFL, to blended Scotch, perhaps even to 12-year-old single malt. Now? Those dreams will be heavily diluted, if not dashed.

Innovation will suffer. Everyone knows true startup ideas are born after the fourth peg. What future does India have if the next unicorn dies in the bottom of an overpriced bottle? As Keynes said, economies thrive on animal spirits—but take away the spirits, and all you have left is the animal.

And animals, as the old verse reminds us:

‘All animals are strictly dry

They sinless live and swiftly die.

But sinful, ginful, rum-soaked men

Survive for three score years and ten.

And some of them, a very few

Stay pickled till they’re 92.’

The health argument doesn’t hold water. Force the masses to drink tea and coffee and you get ulcers and insomnia. Worse, they might start drinking tap water and develop an amoebiasis-tinted worldview. Apart from its stellar pickling qualities, alcohol is also vegan—and everyone knows vegan is healthy.

But who would impose such cruelty? Surely not politicians—they know better than to alienate the tippler vote. A mildly inebriated public is a forgiving public, willing to overlook potholes, corruption, and broken promises. Of course, I’m hardly an expert in politics—I once voted for the CPI(M) under the mistaken impression that its initials stood for Cocktail Party of India (Martini).

So, who could have done such a dastardly deed? Some dastard, no doubt, who prefers revenue to revelry. This reeks of a mandarin’s doing: some dyspeptic soul in Mantralaya, likely a teetotaller, nursing a grudge and a glass of Horlicks.

A word about those grandiose dreams of extra revenues. If the file-pushers think the excise hike will boost revenue, they’ve clearly never met a Mumbaikar with access to a car and a weekend. Goa and Daman beckon, open-armed and fully stocked. Meanwhile, restaurants in Maharashtra will go bust trying to sell irresponsibly priced whisky, although some of us will grab at an EMI-payment option.

Weddings will suffer. Families will be forced to choose between a decent photographer and a decent bar. Uncle Manas’s signature dance moves? Gone. Kitty parties? Sober. Bollywood sob stories about drunks? You can’t have a Devdas crying over an inflated booze bill.

Bandra back-alley bonding over cheap rum? Extinct. A generation will grow up never having seen an aunty tipsily confessing which cousin she really can’t stand. Who will fill the dance floors at weddings? Who will sing off-key at karaoke nights? Society as we know it will unravel.

This isn't just economic policy—it’s a war on joy, on rose-coloured spectacles. A crackdown on creativity. It’s a frontal assault on the time-honoured right to occasionally escape life with a little help from fermentation. By making this escape prohibitively expensive, the government is forcing its citizens to confront reality stone-cold sober---which is terribly inhumane. It’s nothing less than an attack on our humanity. As Descartes said, ‘I drink, therefore I am.’

But in this hour of darkness, there is one silver lining: tipplers across caste, creed, and class have united. A slurred uprising is upon us.

As some poet almost said:

They came for the country liquor, and we muttered.

They came for the IMFL, and we protested.

They came for the Single Malts... and we switched to duty-free.