Sobriety and soul

When he wrote his oft-quoted paean to the peg - "candy is dandy/ but liquor is quicker"- Ogden Nash had 'ice-breaking', not inebriation, in mind. That 'hick, hick, hooray' to the high was raised by another poet - Dorothy Parker - who said, "I love to drink Martinis/Two at the very most,/ Three I'm under the table,/Four I'm under the host."

It stands to reason, therefore, when Harvard School of Public Health researchers analysed preventable causes of death in the US in 2009, they found a very mixed bag of effects attributed to alcohol.

On the positive side, tippling ostensibly averted about 26,000 deaths each year from heart attack, strokes and diabetes. But this was more than offset by an estimated 90,000 deaths from liver disease, traffic accidents and other ill-effects due to heavy guzzling.

The scientists concluded that moderation is absolutely imperative when it comes to drinking. Indeed, when one crosses the line, the much-touted benefits vanish quickly and are replaced by a long litany of evils ranging from serious liver disease and high blood pressure to certain cancers, traffic accidents and violence.

That may explain why traditional systems like Hatha-Yoga entirely eschew alcohol. In post-modern times, their logic may seem tad simplistic: but they likened it to supping with the Devil: no matter how long your spoon and how many 'bargains' one has managed to wrest from the Old One, in the end, he always manages to get the supper's (or sippers') soul! The moral? It is better to be stone-sober than soulless, and lead-dead.