Raise a toast, responsibly

For reasons hitherto unexplored, the image of a hard drinking woman has undergone a sea change in the past few decades in India. Those familiar with the stereotyping of the film industry of yore will recall numerous movies in which Nadira, playing the vamp, would be rarely seen without her bottle of "Scaatch" and slurring vowels.

Women who drank were supposed to be all that "good" women were not: lascivious, sensual, powerful and evil.

Fortunately for us all, this stereotyping was put to rest along with the rest of the formula film around the 1990s when liberalisation, globalisation and economic reform reached Indian shores.

Films meant for multiplex and NRI audiences began to reflect the changing times and perhaps the turning point was when Dil Chahta Hai, said to be the pathbreaker for the industry in many ways, had Dimple Kapadia playing a divorcee and an alcoholic (there you go with the stereotyping) but one who nevertheless was portrayed in a sympathetic role as a dignified and noble woman. It was a reflection of the changing mores across urban India.

Women were joining the workforce in larger numbers, earning decent salaries, which afforded them disposable incomes, and often living away from their childhood homes. New bars and pubs were opening up, TV sitcoms like Friends, which beamed an existence of bonhomie and socialising into Indian drawing rooms, were suggesting a whole new way of life for a young new India.

It was time to say goodbye to old ways, old baggage, societal disapprovals and other limitations. In pubs across the cities of India, women were being served drinks with or without male company.

And it wasn't just the young women whose celebratory clinking of glasses heralded this brave new world. Their elder sisters and aunts - and even moms - were taking to this celebratory new lifestyle with vigour.

Girls' nights out, catching a drink with one's besties at a club or winding down the day with a bottle of wine became the new badge of savoir-faire for women in urban India.

I write this on a day when the alcohol content in Mumbai lawyer Jahnavi Gadkar's blood was found to be four times the legal limit when she crashed her Audi into a taxi this week, killing two people and injuring four others.

Gadkar is not the only woman who has courted tragedy while driving under the influence of alcohol in Mumbai. In 2010, Nooriya Haveliwala allegedly lost control of her SUV and mowed down two people. Two years later, Aarti Shetty allegedly crashed her BMW into an auto, killing one person.

This presentation of data is not supposed to make a sexist, misogynist point against women who drink. (From a family whose matriarch has a beer in the afternoon followed faithfully by a chhota peg at night, I am the last person to put a dampener on the phenomenon of women and alcohol). But what I hope to do is to encourage a moment of introspection and circumspection.

Are Indian women drinking to keep up with their male counterparts? Is getting drunk after work a way to enter an exclusive boys' club or be seen as one of the guys? Is there some kind of peer pressure involved? And if so, do women realise that their systems cannot handle the same amount of alcohol as men? Has the time come for women to say "been there, done that" and take their foot off the alcohol pedal?

What do we need to do to ensure that a woman's celebratory "cheers" do not become someone else's tears - a few hours later?

Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasmumbai@gmail.com