Cola for beginners

Don’t tell my mother I’m living in sin
Don’t let the old folks know
Don’t tell my twin that I breakfast on gin
He’d never survive the blow.

A.P.Herbert

Cola for beginners

“Lacking character does not preclude a person from being a good mixer, and gin - a better mixer than other spirits - follows the human trait,” says Anthony Hogg, former Director of wine giant Peter Dominic. Our friendly neighbourhood school going Cola, now much in the news and being talked about in parliament, is just as good a mixer and sweet as sin to boot. But children, poor things, deprived of the “comfort” of alcohol know all about this. They are naturally inclined to suck up large draughts of the stuff, instinctively quaffing their way towards a most satisfying “sugar hit” and the interesting arrhythmia it brings on. Should the buzz wear off too soon, with frequency and familiarity it can sometimes happen, they know the only thing to do is alternate swallows of hot jalebi with cool glugs of the stuff. Double trouble is thus guaranteed. And can we adults imagine how much fun that can be?

So maybe our crusading Union Health Minister is barking up the wrong tree. It’s understandable. After all, Dr. Ramadoss must be smarting from all his lost battles with dengue and AIDS and sanitation and hygiene and smoking in movies and even AIIMS Director Venugopal. What better distraction than to go to war against cola, pizza, kachori, samosa and yes, it’s there in the fine print after hamburger, cutlet and chips. No more jalebis hot or otherwise to be sold in schools. And colleges as well. The only way to get Ramadoss off fast food and cola and yoga and young people is to distract him into something else. So indubitably it’s sugar he needs to pay attention to. It’s the sugar that is contaminated with pesticide - 24 times more than he can allow. Says CSE (Centre for Science and Environment), it is the sugar in the cola and not that nice mineral water or secret formula concentrate that have been trotted out as the usual suspects so far.

Thus Dr. Ramadoss needs to take urgent steps to ban sugar cultivation and consumption in all its forms forthwith. The gin drinkers, deprived of sugar based ethanol, can jolly well go back to making moonshine in the tall grass, fermenting anything, of any character whatsoever that is willing to ferment. But Minister Ramadoss, the benefactor, will become the saviour too and all because of this one first action. The yoga will work. The Type II diabetes will abate. The UPA government will fall and PMK backed DMK (or will it have to be the other way around), will rule at the centre for the next ninety years.

Dr. Anbumani Ramadoss will be immortalised. His statue will be erected on Marina beach and bear the legend “The Nation’s Health Giver.” And this even as Ramadoss, a young man still, will be named Union Health Minister for life. He can go further, much further, and clean up coffee next. After all, CSE says it contains 190,000 times more pesticide than it should. Imagine, Ramadoss could change the drinking habits of everyone south of the Vindhyas. That he can’t ever go back home is surely a small price to pay for national good health.

Apples incidentally weigh in at 100,000 times the safe limit for pesticides. Maybe he can stop their cultivation too. Then there’s the egg at 3,853 times too much pesticide. So, Ramadoss needs to issue a notification to the hens to stop egg production forthwith. A cup of rice has 34,180 times too much pesticide and so the staple diet of the Gangetic plain must be sacrificed too. A large glass of milk has 6,560 times too much and so the cows must do their duty and stop production. Then there’s mutton, which has 20,140 times too much and rabdi (the food, not the wife of a fellow union minister), contains 6,560 times the permissible limit.

Maybe it’s a better idea to 1) dismantle the CSE and 2) ban all pesticides.
Merry Christmas!

(695 words)

By: Gautam Mukherjee

Friday, 22nd December 2006

Also published in The Sunday Pioneer, 24th December 2006www.dailypioneer.com