Inside the whisky circle, the ‘other’ with a lemon slice

Choosing soda over scotch: The Bacchus-blessed and the rest of us Hungāma hai kyun barpā? Of belonging, refusal, and the soda glass

Why the uproar when I haven’t had a drop? Of belonging, refusal, and the soda glass

I did not grow up in a home that smelled of whisky. Ours was a house of teacups, not tumblers—cups rattling against saucers during Doordarshan news hours, tea cooling on the dining table while ceiling fans whirred above. The first twenty-five springs of my life passed in a home built on government salaries and guarded respectability where alcohol was mentioned sotto voce, if at all. Budgets were balanced, appearances kept, lives quietly contained. I was tucked inside the predictability of Kolkata’s middle-class morality.

So when I moved to Delhi in my mid-twenties, alcohol was not in my bloodstream, not in my vocabulary. The city, however, had other plans. Its evenings were sharper, faster, its rhythm dictated not just by ambition but by glasses clinking in smoke-hazed corners. Back then, I was a young reporter at the bottom rung, learning the climb. My new friends in Delhi—mostly students, some doing their doctorates—introduced me to their own ritual: Drink as conversation, drink as defiance, drink as a rite of youth. I joined in. At first, it was a novelty, then a habit, then a swagger. I drank not every day but often enough to count as regular. Whisky burned my throat, beer sat heavy, rum softened edges. I thought I had found initiation into adulthood.

Well, I mistook intoxication for inclusion. But my body staged a veto a couple of years later. By the third amber ring on the table, the evening’s bravado gave way to a gut-level mutiny of sorts, that, with weary predictability, ended in the same ritual: The sink, the blackout, and a quiet truce with my stomach by the next morning.

I learnt that there was a term for it: Alcohol intolerance. It doesn’t always arrive at the initial stage of drinking. In some cases, it accumulates quietly, like rust under enamel. With me, the years of forced conviviality had worn the body down until it refused outright. My doctor put it in clinical terms—enzymes, metabolism, the stomach’s diminishing tolerance. Ironically, the diagnosis felt less medical than existential. I could digest ambition, deadlines, even nicotine. What I could not digest, finally, was the very liquid that masqueraded as the rite of admission to the circle.

Eventually, I quit, not in moral triumph, but in a hard-bitten obedience to biology. No announcements. No promises. Just a quiet retreat, as if I were slipping out by the service exit after last orders. Shame lingered like an aftertaste—persistent and unflattering—until, in time, it thinned and folded into acceptance.

One would think quitting means closure. Instead, it opens a different kind of dilemma—tallied not in deadlines or numbers but in glasses—played out under banquet neon where the after-hours version of work assembles. High tables, low gossip, playlists in polite volume. There, I count my late nights in soda, not scotch. The glass is always clear—ice ticking, a tired lemon riding the rim like a flag of truce, two wet rings on the coaster. I hold it and learn the choreography of standing inside the circle without dissolving into it.

With that glass in hand I feel less a participant than a specimen. “Oh, you don’t drink”—half-smile, half-smirk—the remark drifts across the table. The lines are always soft: “At least two, build capacity,” “a drink or two solves everything.” No one bars you from the circle, but the circle never fully closes around you.

They are the Bacchus-blessed, I am the ‘other’—admitted but not assimilated, excluded not by decree, but by my own body’s revolt. It is never explicit. No one asks you to leave the table. But exclusion works more quietly, by not letting you dissolve into the flow. I stay, I don’t blend.

But there is more to this than exclusion. Corporate parties remind me of panopticon, a circular prison built around a central watchtower, where one guard’s gaze could sweep across every inmate. I stumbled upon the sketch of this architecture by 18th century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham through a strange detour of events in my college years. But that’s a story for another day. The point here isn’t the panopticon’s design, but its psychological impact: Not knowing when they were seen, prisoners behaved as if they always were, correcting themselves in anticipation. Nearly two centuries later, Michel Foucault used Bentham’s panopticon to develop the idea of panopticism—power that works through constant visibility, where people internalise the gaze and regulate themselves.

In a room full of raised glasses, the clear soda in my hand seems to be permanently visible from all corners as a quiet record of non-participation. No one declares the rule, it’s nudged: Join us, or remain the anomaly. And so I catch myself adjusting posture, tone, and even exit times—neither too early, nor too late—managing appearances even while refusing the drink.

The same architecture of ‘inclusion-with-conditions’ turns up in other worlds too, not just mine.. A banker friend once put it to me over coffee, without complaint but with clarity, “In our world, every deal is signed twice—once in the boardroom and once at the bar. I attend the first, I skip the second. Colleagues respect me, but there’s a quiet sense that I’m absent from the real stage.”

An ex-colleague who now works in advertising tells a similar story. “We get the brief at the office,” she told me, “but trust is built later—at tastings, after-parties, long client dinners. I show

up with a mocktail and do my job. Most nights, that’s enough. Some nights, when they pick the final group, my name isn’t there. No one says why.” Different rooms, different glasses and the same quiet arithmetic of belonging, shadowed by the dread of exclusion. Every circle survives by deciding who hovers at its edges. Foucault wrote that modern societies are held together by a “constant division between the normal and the abnormal”—a quiet labour of separating, classifying, setting some apart so that others may cohere. Exclusion is rarely announced; it is enacted through small cues, silences, omissions.

The politics of belonging, too doesn’t begin at the entry point, but the moment someone is gently, almost imperceptibly, pushed to the margins.

This quiet shove to the margins has a long cultural echo. More than a century ago, Akbar Allahabadi wrote with his characteristic wit: Hungāma hai kyun barpā, thoṛī sī jo pī lī hai (Why the uproar, if I have drunk a little?) One can almost hear the poet’s shrug, half amusement, half protest at being judged too harshly for a sip. My irony runs in reverse. I could ask: Hangāma hai kyun barpā, hum ne to na pī ik jām (Why the uproar, when I haven’t touched a drop?

Would I have been embraced more easily if I had? Would the laughter have leaned towards me, the camaraderie carried further, the negotiations softened by a shared glass?

If Akbar pleaded for indulgence after drinking, mine is the quieter plea of abstinence—for the right to belong without the prop. His lines carried defiance; mine carry a different fatigue. Yet both ask the same thing of society: To measure a person not by the contents of a glass, but by the contents of their presence.

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