Every morning when I get up I find lines of some old Hindi film or a ghazal going round and round my head. I am puzzled because I can’t recall when I had heard them and why after years they re-emerged in my memory.
One morning it was the opening lines of a ghazal sung by Mehdi Hassan:

Pool hee phool khil utthey merey paimaaney mein, Aap kya aaye bahaar aa gayee meyrey maikhaney mein. (Flowers and blossoms burst into this goblet of mine, With you spring burst into my tavern serving wine.)
I was not sure if I had got the words right: I often mix them up. I assumed they must be from Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Syeda Hameed of the Planning Commission, who is my Urdu mentor, helped me and corrected the name of the poet as Ghulam Tabassum.

However, I was able to discover what had dug out the ghazal in celebration of drinking buried in my memory.
The evening before I received from my friend Amir Tuteja a clipping of an interview given by the author of a recently published book to a staffer of The Washington Post. The staffer Peter Carlson had called on Barbara Holland, an 80 year grandmother with silver-white cropped hair whose 15th book The Joy of Drinking had hit the market.

Carlson arrived at her cottage in the hills on a cold, foggy winter evening in an icy drizzle coming down. He was let in the warm sitting room with a log fire burning in the grate and thick with cigarette smoke. Her words of welcome were “Do you want to stay outside and get pneumonia or come in and get lung cancer?” He had taken a bottle of red wine as a gift which he presented to her, she uncorked it, filled two wine glasses, and said “cheers” and took a sip.

She lit another cigarette and said, “I have only two hobbies. This is one; smoking cigarettes and this is the other,” as she took another gulp of the wine. She is a chain smoker and a chain drinker.

“Booze is the social glue of the human race,” she wrote. It was only after leading a nomadic existence, living on wild animals and bevvies that humans settled down to tilling the land, making wines and beers that they became civilised.

She gave names of American Presidents who were hard drinkers: George Washington made his own Whisky; John Adams started his days with a large tankard of hard cider. The amount of alcohol the founding fathers of the US Constitution consumed in 24 hours makes impressive reading. “54 bottles of Medeira, 60 bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, 22 of port, eight of hard cider and seven bowls of punch.”

Hitherto unknown is the fact that Queen Victoria had a tumbler full of mixed red wine and Scotch in equal proportions every day. Holland is not fussy about what she drinks as long as it is alcoholic. She believes in partying, drinking and singing.

Having read the lively interview, my mind was full of admiration for the gutsy, old Barbara Holland. What she had written kept fermenting inside me through the night .

As others saw us
Peter Mundy came to India in 1627 AD. He travelled extensively through central India a from Surat to Agra through Gujarat and Rajasthan. On his way back to Surat in 1632, he noticed many people addicted to opium. He noted in his diary: “There were many fields of Poppie of which they make opium, called here Afeem by this country people, much used for many purposes. The seed thereof they put on their bread, I mean of white poppy.
Of the husks they make a kind of beverage called Poste, steeping them in water a while, and squeezing and straining out the liquor, they drink it, which does inebriate. In the like manner they use a certain (cannabis) called Bang working the same effect, so that most commonly they will call a drunken fellow either afeemee, postee or  bangee, although mutwallee is the right name of a drunkard.

(From Beyond the Three Seas, Edited by Michael H M Fisher, - Random House)
Bushed
Teacher: Boys, can anyone of you tell the name of the organisation that is headed by Osama Bin Laden.
The entire class shouts - Al Qaida, Sir,
Teacher in response - Right. And what is the organisation headed by President Bush called?
A lone voice: Be-Qaida Sir,
(Contributed by H P Mitra, Kolkata)