India is clearly of the ‘instant asshole, just add alcohol’ belief system—as evidenced by the drunken antics of Dipu and his cousin, four of my eight other subjects, and the perpetrators of the Delhi Gang Rape; the Geri* cruising culture of Chandigarh; and so forth. Munna, Dipu’s father, told me of a murder he had committed; I asked him why. “When men are drunk at night, they are in a state of vipreet buddhi†,” he said. “So if someone provokes us at this time, the first impulse is to kill them.” When drinkers are stigmatized and situated within a good-bad binary, it leads to a
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