What our love for Old Monk says about us
My father's love of Scotch notwithstanding, his bar cabinet (never a proper or elaborate one) always had a bottle of Old Monk for his numerous rum-loving friends. They were mostly journalists who had started out in the early 70's, lived through Prohibition, felt the gag and took the gulp on terraces in Delhi, Kolkata - the cities we have lived in most. Old Monk was there before television could tell you what to drink in the 70's, or even during the 80's in India. It was literally the older monks among us, the mentors - fathers, teachers, cousin-gurus with long hair, the wily uncle, and that fiery aunt - who had introduced us to the dark rum.
They always lured us in with the stories of pirates. I remember how my chain-smoking Eng Lit professor, during a lecture on "Literature and Copyrights", had fished out an empty bottle of Old Monk to underline the historical routes and roots of rum, and the fascination of many writers and poets with the beverage with over 40 per cent alcohol content. The drink of the boisterous brutes, the seamen, the dirty sailors, the naval underlings somehow conjured up a world without borders, and sense of rambunctious adventure, forever lurking in the middle or the margin of great literary works from eighteenth century onwards. Colonial writings had reams on the rum, and Old Monk, birthed in 1954 by Mohan Meakin, itself a product of British Raj, was as pungently alluring as the fictions of Amitav Ghosh, who too talks of the restless seas and atlases of longing.
Rum's age-old link to pirates and reliance of our writers, painters, photographers, journalists, professors, struggling musicians, and even daredevil students, on Old Monk, have been enduring connections. Post-independence India needed much to start afresh, even reclaim a spirit of internationalism that was the hallmark of the past two centuries through nationalism. Old Monk bottled in so much of all those years: it wasn't just nostalgia, it was affordable self-fashioning, a statement by those who had light wallets, heavy hearts and crazy wide-eyed wonder. Even now, the old man in a bottle is a staple among the beginners in many field, as well as the eccentrics who "refuse to grow up" and graduate to more expensive brands like Bacardi or switch to single malts altogether.
Old Monk has been about culture within a culture, and as a number of alcohol connoisseurs among us, especially Bhaichand Patel, have indicated, "it's more Press Club of India than Oberoi hotel". Journalism always had its share of snobs - especially in English-language journalism, before it became a gargantuan beast called media, engulfing nuance and edge alike - and there were the spirit snobs who were the most conspicuous. But even then, Old Monk retained its charm and the top spot among Indian Made Foreign Liquor.
As "experts" pontificate how Old Monk, which never ever spent a single rupee on advertisement and, like a planetary cult, always relied on word of mouth and its loyalists (there are Old Monk fan clubs which have, since mid-2000s, made their presence felt online: now Facebook has more fan pages than we can count), is in desperate need of a "marketing strategy" as a rescue effort, it bespeaks how times have really changed.
For the hip restaurant on the high street has given way to franchises in glass-walled glittering malls flattening out the lives of spirits. Old Monk had thrived in the darker alleys, in the dimly-lit corners of bars and pubs, bistros that were easy on the pocket but belted out smoky rebellion. Mostly consumed at home, in the one or two-roomed barsaati dwellings, the Indian rum was about nursing a quaint quiddity of times past and present. It was never about the future: hence, sales figures never entered its lexicon.
That Old Monk is slipping down is perhaps the saddest sign of a time furiously leaving behind all that India meant for our parents, and for some of us who, unbelonging to this shiny, bendy, sleek hologram of the now, derive sustenance from the past, unsure about the future. We sip our dark rum with Pepsi or Coke, barely remembering Thums Up.
Yet, many of us can't help thinking that if the Monk could live on a high for five decades without self-promotion, couldn't it now? Must it too bow before the soulless caprices of the business of advertisement, or even more terrifyingly, be bought off by a bigger player in the market? For the longest, Old Monk connoted a kind of resistance. The resistance of the newbie against the manacles of Indian middle class tradition; the resistance of mid-level artist against diluting and selling out, becoming more "popular" than art; the resistance of the Press Club of India-frequenting editor/journalist to giving in to charms that be in the corridors of the Oberoi.
But this is a time when such distinctions are not so obvious and absolute.
By dint of our postmodern relativism, we have become shape shifters without definite and strong likes and dislikes, or even affiliations. It's a looseness, a lightness not yet unbearable that allows us to sip on red wine at a high-flying book launch on a Saturday evening and come back to a rooftop gathering of Old Monk-drinking friends discussing state of politics, journalism, Indian writing, Chetan Bhagat, Narendra Modi, and all that jazz. There are other drinks too: whiskey, gin, vodka. But the fat old man with a wicked smile is a tenant of our soul (jostling for space with that ganja-mad friend of ours who still refuses to have anything but dark rum and warm water). He is not going anywhere, is he?
If Mohan Meakin is forced to fall back on marketing, then the very first advert that Old Monk will come out with, be it on print or television, will be an item of great novelty. And great sorrow. We will all toast to that immense heaviness of being. Perhaps take selfies with the fat old man too.