why do you do, what you do?

yesterday, sitting at this gentlemen’s club that’s posing as a bar (and i’m surprised no one has noticed. and even if they have, they haven’t torched it down just to get rid of a huge pocket of dullness) at the intercontinental, my friend looks at me from across a table and asks me, ‘why do you drink?’

first off, i should mention, i hate people asking me questions to which i don’t know answers to. the simple ones are especially irritating. the things you really should know but have never thought about since you’re too busy worrying about whether it’s a dry day today - it being the 6th day of ganesh chaturti. and it's really not fair. i mean, how can you come across as a terribly bright woman who makes sparkling conversation, armed with a little knowledge about a lot of things, if people ask you questions that flummox you.

secondly, people are not supposed to ask you deep meaningful questions like that when you’re on your first bucketful of beer. the first drink is when your brain cells are casually disintegrating the information it has amassed during the course of the day and rearranging themselves into little cerebral cavities to turn in for the night. (brain cells work pretty much the same was government institutes work) and when suddenly forced to think of an answer to a question like that, the poor little things stressed, shriveled, and got into a manic buzz of activity in angry protest. (i have to admit, i felt extremely guilty about lulling them into a sense of false security, pretending that they were off the job, when my friend rudely pulled them right back into the thick of things.)

thirdly, it's an intensly private thing to ask someone. it should rank right up there with, 'how old are you?', 'how do you vote?', 'how often do you shave your armpits?' and such like.

i’m still trying to figure why he though i needed a reason to drink. drinking is like breathing, only more pleasurable since you aren’t ingesting huge amounts of toxic fumes. and i’m still trying to figure why i proceeded to give him plenty of reasons (each more far fetched than the other) all of which he conscientiously rejected.

but i have to admit, the answer came to me when i woke up this morning, clear of the head and cramped of the muscles.

i drink, because people like him drive me to drink. to get over the trauma of not being able to answer his totally irrelevant question yesterday, i drank another two bucketsful of beer.

and i really wouldn’t mind another one right about now. (hear, hear, nikhil)