Rosalyn D'Mello: Why should boys have all the booze?

A few months ago, over happy hours at the recently renovated Mad Men-themed mezzanine of Drums of Heaven, my sister, my friend Bhuvana and I had a very heated debate about the under-representation of women's liquid appetites in the advertising industry. Why was it that the Indian liquor industry spends such little energy on targeting women as consumers of their brand? We each had our opinions, but, when we started to examine recent advertising history, could only find one ad featuring Priyanka Chopra as singular evidence of a woman being a brand ambassador for alcohol. The 40-second-long black and white film plays with visual and textual semantics, featuring Chopra clad in a sexy black dress walking in and out of scenes as if she was on a runway, leaving gaping mouths in her trail while her voiceover delivers a brief monologue about style. At no point, though, does she actually hold or sip off a glass, which could be written off as one of the compromises made by surrogate advertising. Or was it really an attempt to come to the edge of a line without actually towing it forward?

Let's not forget Cersei Lannister of Game of Thrones, who, in the season six finale watched parts of King's Landing erupt with wild fire, the consequence of her own actions, while treacherously sipping from a goblet of wine

In mainstream Indian cinema and advertising, women drinking for pleasure is still taboo. A woman either gets drunk or drinks because she's inherently a vamp. The West, on the other hand, has been subtly representing women drinking both shamefully and shamelessly, most immediate case in points being the series Mom, starring Alisan Janney and Anna Faris who are recovering addicts; Cougar Town, where Jules (Courtney Cox) plays a divorced mother whose main recreational activity with her gang involves guzzling copious amounts of red wine; and The Good Wife, where Alicia (Julianna Marguiles) has a daily ritual where she returns home and uncorks a bottle of red. And let's not forget Cersei Lannister of Game of Thrones, who, in the season six finale watched parts of King's Landing erupt with wild fire, the consequence of her own actions, while treacherously sipping from a goblet of wine. Sadly, Indian television has no such memorable dipsomaniacal female characters to boast of, or even women protagonists who simply savour the glint of a red swirling in a glass.

It's perhaps why, when you're at a restaurant with a male companion and he asks for a beer and you ask for a whiskey, on the rocks, the waiter inevitably inverts the order so that you have to switch among yourselves. Except when you're out on a Ladies' Night, when the bartender's sole diktat is either to get women drunk on cheap alcohol or dilute their drinks so there's no scope for a high. Either way, the goal of a night like that is to lure men into the bar, especially on low-key weeknights, like a Tuesday or Wednesday, and which way the peg swings depends on where you go. Sadly, I've yet to find a Ladies' Night anywhere in India that has offers like the kind in Dubai, where you're offered champagne on the house with a side helping of cheese, peanuts or cashews. This explains why, when you walk out of Hauz Khas Village past midnight on any day of the week, you're likely to find drunk women either being escorted by their male companions or puking ungraciously on the side of the road, or even being loud and boisterous. As a society, we've never encouraged the creation of a safe drinking atmosphere for women. As if the biological constitutions of our body precluded us from such pleasures.

I finally read the solitary essay in House Spirits by a woman, Kanika Gahlaut, who is now 40, and who speaks frankly of having a 20-year drinking past. However, she no longer drinks, she tells us, but considers her history as "qualification enough to land me a piece in this anthology," a sentence that horrified me, because why should a woman writer have to justify her contribution to an anthology about drinking in India, especially when the book features fiction, too. Sadly, when her essay is not a guileless record of her previous inebriations, it is drably didactic. The essays by men, given the relentless flow of them, feel monotonous, reminding me of the last time I was at Olive, in Bandra, with three wonderful women, all of us with drinks. Rohini, the RJ and a mutual friend, passed us by on her way back from the loo, asking if she could join us for a bit. We were happy to have her company.

"It's just that I'm with these grown boys, and all they talk about is the last time they got smashed." We, on the other hand, had been speaking about art, biennales, ex-lovers, acrylic furniture, and everything in between. I had no doubt ours was the more interesting table.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputed art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com