Plight of the lungi clad

So it is all over the news, the sorrowful plight of the Alcoholics in Kerala. Media and social media is taking that drum and beating the shit out of it. Everyone is having a good laugh – right from the acne faced kid who is laughing his arse off at the news with his friends in a pub, to the latest trend - sadistic friends from the Garden city who send snickering selfies taken in front of neatly kept rows of bottles in a supermarket to their wallowing mates or the retired military chap who has suddenly become the most popular man in his community to the vociferous voices of the righteous leaders who have taken it their next big stance to rid the evil off the state.

Everyone is tut-tutting the hideous habits of the Malayali which has painted this bull’s eye right on his favorite glass. Its curtains for the days of alcoholism for the nefarious lungi clad ruffians – they had it coming didn’t they? With their drunken days of debauchery, the wife beating cretins had it coming. With their massive drinking habits – HIGHEST in the country you know! Bloody drunkards!!! Born to be scorned.

There is another side to this statistics. World leaders in alcohol consumption according to 2013 OECD Health Data are from Luxembourg who in a year polish off 15.3 liters of the spirited stuff per capita. Kerala stands way below in this count with a per capita consumption of roughly 6.7 liters (http://www.deccanherald.com/content/319390/kerala-tops-per-capita-liquor.html). The national average for India is not far below with 4.6 litres of liquor per head (2010 data from the World Health Organization report published in 2014). In a land of 1.2 billion people, this converts to a huge number of 750 ml bottles of the funny stuff – avoiding decimals here to show how big the number is – its roughly 7,360,000,000.  The average Malayali’s share in the overall gulping in the country is a measly 4.85 %. The average Malayali drinks almost 6 ml more alcohol per day than the average Indian. That much alcohol is present in the daily dosage of a child’s cough medicine. Guilty as charged !

And while we are on statistics, another interesting piece of percentage – “Kerala, with its huge migration stream to the Middle Eastern region accounted for nearly 40% of household remittance flows to the nation” says Chinmay Thumbe in his 2011 working paper for IIMB. In simpler terms, the Malayali NRI sends home more money. Wonder how many Keralites are aware of this?

Rank	Country	Litres consumed per capita[1]	Year
1	Luxembourg	15.3	2009
2	France	12.6	2011
3	Austria	12.2	2009
4	Estonia	12.0	2011
5	Germany	11.7	2009
6	Ireland	11.6	2011
7	Czech Republic	11.5	2011
8	Portugal	11.4	2007
8	Spain	11.4	2009
10	Belgium	10.8	2008
10	Hungary	10.8	2010
12	Denmark	10.6	2011
12	Slovenia	10.6	2011
14	Poland	10.4	2011
15	Australia	10.0	2010
15	Switzerland	10.0	2011
15	United Kingdom	10.0	2011
18	Slovakia	9.9	2011
19	Finland	9.8	2011
20	Netherlands	9.4	2009
21	New Zealand	9.3	2012
22	South Korea	8.9	2011
23	Chile	8.6	2009
23	United States	8.6	2010
25	Greece	8.2	2009
26	Canada	8.0	2011
27	Sweden	7.4	2011
28	Iceland	7.3	2008
28	Japan	7.3	2011
30	Italy	6.9	2009

One more look at Kerala and the land it is. Apart from a few crooks and a fair number of politicians, most of the inhabitants are friendly souls who walk within the fine lines of the judiciary. The fact that they are more educated than most also contributes to the fact that right from the top layer to the bottom, a majority of the tipplers gather their ambrosia from the Government run outlets or from bars where the supply is again from the government (as a result, there hasn’t been any major hooch tragedies in the state in the past few years, a good initiative indeed). There are no private licenses to make any kind of alcoholic substance – other than the clergy. Ahem ahem ! Let’s not go there now, but what this means is that most of the alcohol in the state is accounted for and that is the exact number which is reflecting in the statistics as mentioned above.

There are states in India where spurious liquor flows to pave destruction on the health of the poor who turn to these cheaper but far more dangerous forms of a high. In the one state which implemented prohibition as it was wallowing in the sorrow of the demise of Mahatma Gandhi, It is open knowledge that the prohibition has resulted in raising a crop of enterprising bootleggers who have been attending to the needs of thirst. There was a hooch tragedy in the state as recent as 2009 which claimed 126 lives. How many more were incapacitated due to it? There are no statistics available for the survivors. There is no agency or office to capture the copious millions of liters of bootlegged alcohol in the country – these numbers never make it to a WHO report and that is why the straight forward Malayali with a healthy outlook at drinking has an incriminating number and the dubious honor of being the state which consumes the most amount of (accounted) liquor.

Yes, there is a portion of people in the land who are slaves to the bottle and waste their considerable income (Kerala has one of the highest average labor wages in the country) on liquor. They need help they need help right now, because they are addicted to liquor. But to think that everyone in Kerala drinks like a fish and are on their way to an early and unproductive grave, That is a mistake and a gross generalization. It up to the governance to decide who to help and how to educate them and make them understand the dangerous effects of excessive drinking.

While the government is bent upon redeeming the population of the southern state, there are more than a few people who like their drinks for what they are and romance a drink for different emotions a glass evokes. For the many, a peg of Old monk, that slightly sweetish dark rum topped with bubbling soda symbolizes friendship forged over years, a glass of brandy shared with the family denotes a festive occasion, a frothy cheers and tinkling of beer mugs at the end of a Friday means fun for the ones who toil away five days a week and is just about to let their hair down and unwind..  And a sip of Single malt at the end of a long day brings the taste of a languid sunset right to the tongue of a connoisseur. They form the majority of a peace loving populace who are hardworking and honest. They would rather contribute their hard earned cash over to the state coffers than fill the filthy wallet of a rakish bootlegger.  

Classroom Ecosystems, Theory of relativity and rest of the scientific postulations of a Dung.

As a young boy whose senses went to hyper drive in Science classes, I always surmised that just like how an apple falling on the brain filled pate of Newton led to the discovery of gravity and rendered all of us prone to its rather dull laws (imagine a world without gravity!! Newton, you killjoy, you should have slept somewhere else), Einstein must have been jolted into the formation of the theory of relativity when a snotty brat of three or four, a distant relative removed twice over, fell on his head.

Science teachers never bothered me with questions in class, for they always faced ‘The stone wall’ whenever a question was raised to my mug. The answer, delivered in a stare as vacant as the audience of an award movie and uninterrupted stony silence which ticked into minutes always ended with the exasperated teacher shouting in frustration “Do you know the answer or not, stop drooling in the class and answer...” To which the stone would rotate its head precisely 35 degrees horizontally to the left, 70 degrees to the right and come back to its original position. Once the fear of the stone wall was put into the teacher’s mind, the legend grew and he and the rest of his tribe left me alone.

While the good part about being left to your devices in a science class was that the world of science opened themselves up to you to your own imagination, the flipside is that the evaluators always insisted that the paths to derivations of complex theories were to be exact or at least similar to the paths defined by the great scientists themselves. This meant that my poems for solving E= MC2 and other incomprehensible theorems were not acceptable in the hallowed grounds of science. The teacher who evaluated my paper cursed me in the name of Einstein that day. Something about him rolling over in his grave – ‘Yeah right !’ I said to myself.  The said teacher’s pedagogy was lethal enough to put him there.

In science class, you get to see different kinds of creatures. The top of the food chain is always the apex predator – Teacherosorus Rex, whose absolute power over the class were bestowed on him by the center of the universe and Supreme Predator – the Principal. But Since we are referring to micro ecosystems, Teacher is the one to count. Below him are the Studiosaurus. These are dangerous cretins who live under the shade of the Rex. They are up to date with all that is taught in the class and sometimes what is to be taught in the future too (they had the space time continuum equation down pat – the dorks probably could travel in time !!) They snigger and feed on the scraps of meat the Rex tore off the sheep on a daily basis.

The sheep form the majority in any class. Easily identified by averted gazes and reluctance to stand up and face the music, the sheep are the fodder which keeps the ecosystem lively. While any rare question thrown to a Studiosarus will be answered in precise clipped tones pleasing to the ears of the Rex, The sheep will try to fluster their way out of the inevitable.

There is a method to it. Observation was the only available weapon against boredom in the age before texting. The sheep are wily in their own rather unimaginative manner. If I may ask the reader to set your mind in slow motion, this would be the sequence of events.

1.       Teacher forms the vilest, most difficult to answer question(sometimes the answer would not even exist; but he will throw it anyway in the hope that someone will answer it for him so that he can get the next Nobel prize and torment little kids with his discoveries) and throws it in a general direction.

2.       Only in slow motion is the visualization possible because all of this happens so fast, a scene reminiscent of Neo dodging bullets in the Movie – The Matrix. Question hurled, the Studiosaurus who happen to be sitting on the side will try to catch it – but the missile is past his grip (it was never intended for him anyway- where is the fun in that?), sheep avert their gaze to infinity and beyond lest the question latch on to their souls through their eyes. They sway away from the question, instant relief visibly relaxing the faces of the escapees. The loathsome question goes on further to hit the class wall and bounce back to the Rex. Oh the walls were mottled with the shrapnel of misdirected questions.

3.       This is the gruesome part, when the Rex loads the question loads the question on to an assassin’s rifle and points it directly at the most scared looking sheep who is trying to avoid his gaze so much that his eyes are literally at the back of his head.

4.       Point of contact and announcement. The question hits the hapless sheep on the face, splatters its gore all over him and to add to the misery, the sheep’s name will be announced in class by the ferocious Rex. The naming ceremony will be followed by a staccato verbal command to ‘Stand up’ and face the end of the world as the poor sheep knows it.

5.       Slaughter is too mild a word for what happens next. The meek one will stammer his way into a wrong answer, to be sharply ridiculed by the roar of the predator. Then he will try to bluff his way out, inventing one faulty theory after another, to save his precious behind. But as a rule, even if the sheep had mugged the confounding theory by heart, the knowledge will be locked in the deep recess of his mind and the key lost till the class gets over. All in fear of the mighty gaze of the apex predator. The carnage is too gory to be put in words... I am sure anyone who has set foot in a class has been witness to this scene.

The lowest forms of life found in a class room are the Dung. Yes dung – as in solid waste material from the Netherlands of an animal. Called so because they are inert, they have no need to process anything as they are already processed and they are generally left alone to their own state for fear of stirring up their strong disagreeable stench. All predators shun the dung for two reasons. The studiosaurus wouldn’t be caught dead with one for fear of intellectual erosion and the Rex leaves them alone because – well, who would want to willingly stomp their feet on feces anyway ? I was a proud member of this minuscule clan who lived vicariously with the help of their extremely sharp eye sight. On one rather humbling instance, it did land me in trouble. During an exam, I photocopied the answer sheet of the helpful soul sitting next to me diligently and exited the exam hall with joy in my heart until I came by the information that my subject was physics and his – Chemistry.

The dung beetles are similar to a dung but they are smarter as they devise ways to scurry themselves out of the class right after the attendance is taken. If they cannot get out of the class, the beetles will transmogrify into dung till they get a chance to escape. Since they are smarter than t a dung, they exist a rung just above the lowest in the system.

And lastly the one species of class dweller who is above all. Even the Apex predator is no match for the abilities of 'The apparition' . They are ever present but never present because their muster numbers will be shouted along with others by proxy magic. The Apparition can be seen in public only once or twice in an academic year, and when they do appear in flesh and blood, mayhem ensue among the dwellers thinking the newcomer was yet another Rex, bent upon exacting their pound of flesh from the survivors.

Whoever says science is a mystery, you can say that again mister.