ONE sometimes forgets that our children and their friends are no longer ‘children’. They are adults with lives that have become quite independent of ours. On several matters, they are better informed and could teach our generation a thing or two. This could be anything from care of the environment to pinning down where we went wrong — and how we continue with the wrongdoing. At the same time, it could also be information about a better brand of whisky and the shop where you’ll find it unadulterated and undiluted. That said, one may add that I had my first official glass of beer when I was around 16 or 17. This was at a family lunch where an uncle poured it out and all present — including my father — went ‘cheers’. I cannot recall if I was hesitant or whether I happily glugged it down.The glass of beer was all very well, but that was not the point. That came later when I was made to sit down and told: “You are getting older and we want you to remember a few things — you will buy your liquor from your own money; you will never come home drunk and you will not drink or do anything else in secrecy. If you want a drink, you shall be open about it. You will do nothing like a thief.”That moment removed the hypocrisy attached to drinking and the pretence that we won’t quaff a couple. That single step moved this ‘social evil’ and financial sinkhole to an area where alcohol consumption was to be handled with responsibility. Not that it has always been that way, but the borders — even if they have occasionally been breached — had, somewhat, been set. What one learnt later, to the best of one’s knowledge, was that traditionally, several communities frowned, at least ‘officially’, upon drinks and a tippler could well find himself ostracised. Be that as it may.In 2016, the Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri-Columbia, USA, published a report that sought to characterise different ‘types of drunks’. The purpose of the study was to assess the extent to which the levels of sober and drunk personality traits could be grouped together to create categories of different ‘drunk types’. A second aim was to examine the alcohol-related harm and consequences. The study was widely publicised and drawing from popular culture, the paper summarised four types of drunks:The Ernest Hemingway kind: This stemmed from the writer who said, famously, that he could “…drink any amount of whisky without getting drunk”. This category did not exhibit any major changes in personality after drinking.The Mary Poppins kind: This came from that much-loved character created by PL Travers which went on to become an equally loved film and drew on already outgoing types who somehow got sweeter and happier with alcohol.The Nutty Professor: This came from the 1996 film that had a chemically-altered academic with a split personality, and was played by Eddie Murphy. According to the study, this category consisted of those who were natural introverts, but shed their inhibitions after a drink and became more flashy and social.The Mr Hyde sort: This set of drunks came from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ where, simplistically stated, good and evil existed in the same person. As far as this study was concerned, the ‘evil-twin drinkers’ were less responsible, less intellectual and more hostile or aggressive under the influence of alcohol.Anything that becomes an obsession or a fixation cannot bode well. This could be religion, militant vegetarianism (or not), aggressive political belief — the list can go on. That said, there are profound psychological effects of a non-alcohol-induced ‘alcoholic state’. The results can be amusing if not downright hilarious. We were still in our teens and at a friend’s birthday party. No alcohol was being served to us — even if the older ones were eyeing the bottles that were there for the grown-ups.For us, there were ‘soft drinks’ and that standard cold beverage of an age now gone — orange or lemon squash. A glass that had not been rinsed well and carried a faint whiff of alcohol was given to another teenager. “This is not orange squash,” he whispered, “I think this has gin.” Someone sniffed the glass, and mischievously declared, “You are right. Enjoy!”Within moments, with just the thought of having the forbidden, the fine young man with acne and wispy facial hair developed all the outward signs of a drunk. He could not walk straight; his speech was slurred. This was classic auto-suggestion at work. The matter, however, did not end there. The following day, the young man woke up with a dutiful hangover and his parents went house to house complaining how their ‘good boy’ had been ruined by bad company.— The writer is an author based in Shimla