All that was bottled up

An Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting held earlier during this week turned out to be a real eye-opener.

An Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting held earlier during this week turned out to be a real eye-opener. This was not for the genteel, social drinkers who circulate among the chatterati, flitterati, glitterati or whatever one calls the party-hearty. Nor was it for people who decide that one day in a month or a year or whatever, one would make a 'tamasha', drink oneself silly and have the pleasure of waking up to a hangover, the size of Diego Maradona pre-obesity surgery.
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This was about people who simply could not say no to alcohol, though their hands trembled, their friends left them, their wallets shrunk from paying for the next bottle and families shattered like glass under the burden of social shame and financial strain.

A speaker at the meeting said that he lost his brother to alcohol and after that, he became an alcoholic. He said his mother would state the obvious that even after losing his brother to alcohol, he did not learn but became an alcoholic himself. To which he often replied that his mother should drink and then she would realise what is the unique lure of the bottle.

A businessman from Goa called Francis spoke about how he began drinking beer, so that he could muster up enough courage to ask a young woman to dance. Soon, Francis had a girlfriend. Francis became an alcoholic after his girlfriend left him. The successful businessman would make excuses to avoid going to his office, or attend half-day when his hands had stopped shaking. He had to crush and grind his ego as one would do a cigarette butt under one's feet, to join AA and admit he was an alcoholic.

A young speaker, Dhaval, said he got hooked on to alcohol at a picnic and from then on the bottle became his constant companion. Students would vacate the college bench he sat on, as he used to drink heavily. Two women spoke out about how women alcoholics face double the stigma, greater shame, so asking for help is more difficult and they usually drink and die.

In a world politically correct, the candid confessions knocked one off one's feet. This was not the sound of champagne corks popping amidst small talk by the Page 3 set, this was real-life grime. The disease that is alcohol had collected in a person's life like sediment in a drink glass and needed to be scraped out.

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