Trigger Warning: Language that hints at coercion.
“But it’s my birthday!”
“Sometimes, it’s okay.”
“You have to! For me?”
“But how can you not? You did it last time.”
“You are so strict about this, sometimes you should do it for the other person.”
***
Have you heard any of these sentences before?
I bet you have. What’s worse, I bet you have spoken them too, whether you are a girl or a guy.
And no, I am not talking about the bedroom. I am referring to the dinner table!
Shocked?
I was too when I got intentional about my health and lifestyle in 2023.
***
Here’s what happened. In the middle of 2023, I decided that one of the big investments I would make in my life would be in my health, and started with hiring a personal trainer to build discipline. In order to maximise the benefits and balance out the costs, I made the toughest decision: I would eat no more than one meal outside a week.
This decision, in a life that is filled nearly every week with multiple outings: Dinners with friends, family, colleagues, birthdays, engagements, weddings, work events, film screenings, networking events, events that I organise as part of The Screenwriting Corner and Purple Pencil Project, and more.
I thought the toughest part would be resisting the temptations on the table; but that turned out easy after the first week.
What I still struggle with is having to defend my decisions to eat and drink what I want every single time I am in a social setting.
The peer pressure, we receive and what we exert in matters of people’s food and habits is wild, if you think about it closely, mistaking coercion for love and friendship.
And no, I am not stretching it.
***
Around 2017, I had a little tiff with my good friend. “You only drink when you are with your other friends, you never get drunk with me,” I told her, upset.
My really fear was that I was not fun enough, and I would really nearly chew her head off, to have just one drink when she hung out with us.
You know the only time my other friends and I did not badger her? If it was Shrawan, or the one time she said she had a stomach upset.
Then, when wanted to eat clean for a bit, we made fun of her for ordering a salad when all of us were eating pizza. Or when she wanted to have only dal khichdi while we ate the ridiculously delicious but ridiculously unhealthy Indo-Chinese food.
***
It was not until 2023, I understood how ridiculous I’d been.
The first time I went to meet some friends at a restaurant, I ordered only a side of eggs, the one dish I was permitted to consume (cannot cook them at home). One friend ordered a dessert, and offered it to me. My first instinct is to be chirpy, and so I animatedly explained how I was getting a little serious about my fitness and body. What did the friend do? They proceeded to bring the spoonful of pie right up to my lips, enticing me. I was not shaken (to my own surprise), but their insistence on that “one bite” put me off.
The same thing happened the next weekend. I was out with a close group of friends at a bar in Bandra, and while everyone ordered what they wanted, I stuck to my grilled cottage cheese. Making that decision too was awkward, and anticipating some push back, I had messaged everyone in advance about how I would not be eating outside.
Even then, well-meaning, coming-from-a-place-of-love comments found their way to the conversation. “Chal na, you are not that fat!”
“Why do you even need to diet, badhu khavanu pivanu maja in life!”
I love the people, and I know they only meant it as a way for us to just hang out together. Breaking bread is sacred to our humanity. But today, when one bread is a greesy pizza or cheese-laden bread roll and the other grilled vegetables, no one should be made to feel bad about eating what is simply better for the human body.
This normalisation of sugar and high-carbs and unhealthy fats is one of the biggest scams of our society. When did we decide to call good food, “diet” and “a bit much”, I don’t know and why we did that, I won’t understand.
Yet, that is nothing to the sheer extreme that alcohol has been normalised to.
***
Every time a friend visits Mumbai, I am reminded that there is not much you can do in the city besides going to a restaurant, a movie theatre, or a club/pub. Venues for performances arts are few, heritage walks are specific to all of three parts of the city, the roads are unwalkable, the open air is unbreathable, the public parks inaccessible for a quiet private picnic, and the sports situation just recently improved with the trend of pickleball and apps like Hudle.
So every time you are meeting a friend outside of home, it’s got to be a bar. Now, can you imagine what the reaction to not drinking might have been?
“Just for a month right? Because next month is my birthday, you better fucking drink then.”
“What do you mean you don’t feel like a drink. What’s the harm in one glass of wine.”
If you have had alcohol in the past, it’s almost a given that you will drink all the time.
“We need to hang out man, but you are so picky about when you drink!”
Every time I have said, “I am down for a plan but won’t drink,” it has always, always met with protests and peer pressure. So much that I would come up with fake medical reasons to avoid it. After I started driving, the car became my shield against the pressure to have ‘just one drink’.
I was an ethusiastic part-goer in my early 20s, but reaching the 30s, my affinity for even that one drink began to decrease with each passing party. It began to feel like everyone is stuck in a time loop of the one big year of their lives – for the last 8 years, we have been visiting the same bars, listening to and dancing to the same playlists, and making fresh versions of the same memories.
Yet, I am human, and I cannot say no endlessly so I would still end up having that stray jager shot, the cooling beer, that one margarita or gin and tonic – sometimes to honor a friend’s wedding at other’s to celebrate their birthday.
I never understood why my not drinking had to be justified so much. I just knew that I wanted to quit, and I did not want to explain myself every time I said I did not want to eat or drink something.
And so, in October 2024, I decided to get God involved.
***
There is a temple of Shrinathji in Nathdwara which my family has been visiting for years. Over the years my relationship with religion has changed, but never my love for this quaint, chaotic, almost stampede-loving temple town. My brown family that has struggled to find harmony as a unit through all of life, miraculously comes together here where no decisions need to be made by us and thus, there is not reason for discord. The day’s routine is dictated by the timing of the darshan, there are about 3 decent restaurants for meals, and the whole area is so small, no one needs permission to wander off a bit on their own.
We made a visit to Nathdwara in 2024, nearly a year after my brother got married; a first with my sister-in-law. I had just had a drink a week before that with a cousin I hold in high regard; but whom I could not convince that I had quit.
I bowed my head in front of God in that first mangla aarti, and vowed to him, that I would give up every sip of alcohol for a long time, and until a real reason to celebrate presented itself, I would not touch it.
One reason to do this was the commitment-phobia I sit with; saying something and committing to it forever is a scary thought. But the second reason of it was, the moment I said I had vowed in His presence, the questions, I knew, would become less pushy!
That’s exactly what happened; while people still asked me why I took that decision and how I was ‘coping with it’ or ‘having any fun’, no one tried to force me to have a single sip. They will still wonder when my vow ends, and still forget that I don’t drink when the shots start doing the rounds at parties; but no one brings a glass near my nose to tempt me anymore.
It took divine intervention for a social structure (and I would not blame my friends or even any single human, it’s one of those things that are culturally rooted) to accept a simple choice; that of not drinking.
I still get amused by how far I had to go to make it happen.
***
How you do one thing, is how you do everything. This is one of those truths where artists, liberals, conservatives, technocrats, monarchs, young, old, and every one might agree on.
How you do one thing is how you do everything.
So what does it say about our culture where simple things like food and drink habits do not remain choices, but unwritten rules that one must adhere to?
Think about the choice to eat vegetarian meals or ones with meat. Don’t each section routinely kind of hint or subtly force the other to adopt their ways.
The Marwari’s even have a concept for hospitality; manwar. As a guest, when you are served food or drink, you must say no twice to thrice, and the host must do a ‘manwar’, the polite nudging and nagging to force you to eat. I am sure different Indian sub-cultures have different versions of this practice. My relatives all take pride in over-feeding you (I cannot tell you how often I fall sick because someone tried to equate their love for me with the number of rotis I ate). But all of these seems to me a silent teacher that a no is eventually meant to become a yes if we ask enough.
I know I opened this piece a bit sensationally and I know the connection seems a touch too dramatic. I don’t really think that there is any direct connection between coercion on the dinner table, and elsewhere, showing its uglier, nastier side. I am simply wondering out loud; how can we teach each other consent without respecting individual choices in every area of life?
Charity begins at home, the saying goes.
And I think consent begins at the dinner table.