I read an article in a Malayalam paper where a father wrote about the traps ‘ Indian’ children can fall in to while studying in US Universities He mentioned that someone gave his son a fruit punch mixed with alcohol and the son didn’t know it contained alcohol and drank half a cup of the said fruit punch and lost consciousness and ended up in Hospital.
I worked as an emergency medicine physician for a while and this is my take. Assuming a person weighs 100 lbs, he needs 7 units of alcohol to lose consciousness. 25 ml of Whiskey is equal to 1 unit of alcohol. If the fruit punch was mixed with moonshine ( 190 proof) with the first shot, even it is mixed with fruit juice, it will burn your throat like hell and you can smell the alcohol fumes. It is not possible to drink half a cup of fruit punch mixed with alcohol and lose consciousness and get admitted to the hospital.
Yaya once told me, there is only one downside to studying in a US uni. Legal drinking age in US is 21 where as it is 18 in Australia. She also told me the solution to her problem ” I could always take a trip to Canada every weekend”
I know I am supposed to say ” how dare you? You can’t drink alcohol blah blah blah”
I grew up in India and have been drinking from the age of 17. I don’t even know if India has a legal age for drinking. Someone always knew someone in the defence and we always had a supply of alcohol. If the defence supply run out, then we knew where we could get home made wine.
The truth is, I know my children will drink alcohol. it is part of the initiation in to adulthood. Sure, a part of me hopes they will not be a slave to alcohol and will know what their limits are, but I will not tell them not to drink alcohol.
I certainly do not think Universities are full of traps that will destroy my children’s future. I will be sending my children to Uni knowing that there will be drugs, alcohol and lots of sex..It is the same in real life ( outside Uni)
When my children go to Uni, though they are going as adults, I know they will make plenty of mistakes, they are supposed to. They haven’t had a lot of time to act and think like an adult. I know with my longer years of experience living as an adult, I should advice my children.. but I drank while I was at Uni..Why must I lie to them? I strongly believe ” Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.” ( Will Rogers).
So my advice to my children when they go to Uni will be “have fun, enjoy your uni days, work hard and party hard, you will never get the Uni days again.”
I went to an engineering college in Kerala – one of the (good) earlier ones (there was nothing else back then). Everyone was bright (good entrance ranks – supposedly able to think by themselves). I have seen my classmates drunk – sometimes forced to, but more often than not, by choice. I have seen them attending (and disrupting) classes, drunk. One of them slept on a parapet (on the first floor), and woke up to the wrong side (or rolled off – don’t remember), and fractured his bone.
And it is hard to imagine someone not realizing that the drink had alcolhol (especially when it had enough to turn him unconscious in half a cup). Alcohol has a pretty strong smell, and an even stronger taste! Wonder if that father actually believes the story, or is convincing himself that he does….
URT: Here is the article. http://www.manoramaonline.com/cgi-bin/MMOnline.dll/portal/ep/malayalamContentView.do?contentId=16508955&programId=&BV_ID=@@@
I don’t know much about the laws concerning alcohol in US uni campus, but if I am not mistaken, the perpetrator who gave the fruit punch mixed with alcohol to our victim wouldn’t have been expelled in the first instance, he would have been issued with a warning and would have had to attend some remedial class ( Again I am assuming both were under 21 and Unis always give you a second chance for minor offence). There was too much inconsistencies in the story.
I only stopped drinking while on duty because of one incident. I was on call and it was very a quiet evening with nothing untoward happening and went for a party with few friends nearby and drank two shots of vodka on empty stomach ( at 2AM thinking what could happen at that hour)!and came back to the hospital hoping to sleep it off, only to find the emergency room full of patients after a bus accident. I was 21 years old and learned my lesson when I had to suture a patient and saw two of everything and couldn’t open my mouth for fear of getting suspended. I have never gotten drunk after that.
Went through it – He thinks his son doesn’t drink because it is against his faith? ha ha ha
People usually do whatever they want to – And some of them tell their parents what they want to hear… If he had actually named a person, may be it would be different.
I gave up drinking when I realized that I don’t like the taste, the smell or the hangover. If I am going to do something unhealthy, it better be something I enjoy…
I remember reading an article in BBC a few years ago about alcoholism in Kerala.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8557215.stm.
And to claim about the “achadakkam and anusarana sheelam and shantha swabhavam” of Malayalee kids is laughable. Yes, teenagers want to explore things and might want to try alcohol and , but that happens everywhere, especially in Kerala! I feel people don’t even know the difference between alcoholism and occasional social drinking! Malayalees glorify alcoholism like no others (in movies and in real life).I hate to watch Malayalam movies these days because of the abusive language and dialogues showing complete lack of respect to women and elderly! And I experience this first hand whenever I visit Kerala!
Like you said, I don’t know what is the legal drinking age in India. Even if there is a legal age, we all know it is not really enforced! I have seen more drunk people misbehaving in public in Kerala than in the US (I honestly cannot remember witnessing such incidents here. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen here).
I must say US universities have much much stricter policies especially when it comes to drinking on campus and campus housing and underage drinking. I feel Malayalees/Indians in general are quite the hypocrites when it comes to drinking, talking about sex to your kids etc! And as you mentioned in your today’s post, that too from the people of the land of Kamasutra!
KT: Growing up in Kerala, I learned from movies and books that a macho man will hit his wife. It was his right and the woman ought to accept it.That ideology is still perpetrated. You will never see a hero slapping a woman in a western movie, but our fellow sisters and politicians who protested when Danish govt took custody of two indian children( ? Child abuse) still haven’t woken up from their slumber and demand that violence against women in movies ought to stop.
I live in a country with one of the highest rate of alcoholism. I have never been harassed by a drunk to this day. I go to pubs with my friends, sometimes a drunk guy will try to hit on me by asking me to dance or buy me a drink and when I say no, they understand it is a no and leave me alone. If the guy is not drunk and asked me to dance and if he is really ‘hot’, I do dance. After the dance, he goes back to his world, I to mine.
True that! Husband slapping the wife is more common in Malayalam movies than other Indian movies. And we are the state with the highest literacy rate and with a predominant community that is matriarchal!
When I used to see drunk people in buses or roads, semi naked, harassing women, talking non sense, I always wondered how their, mothers/wives/sisters/daughters/anyone else related to them would feel if they happen to see this! I have lived in only one other state in India other than Kerala and it is nearly not as bad!
There are more people drinking alcohol in Western countries (and of course our aristocratic mallus would scorn upon sayippu and madamma for their drinking habits), but you almost never see a drunk person in the middle of a busy road, feeling the need to give a speech/prabhashanam to everyone around!
KT: Why does Indian Males act like that when they are drunk?