I am not talking about my days when my parents bought a ‘half ticket’ for me during rail or bus journeys… but of times when we called one friend of ours ‘half ticket’ because he could never understand that the girls in our class would never want to be in our gulli-danda team. Well, not even in our patangbaazi team. So when the three of us met a week back, I half-expected him to give us hilarious suggestions for a gift for the fourth friend in our group that we wanted to discuss and decide on.
As we sat in a restaurant in CP, I asked, ‘So guys, what gift should we buy for hulk-n-bulk as he joins us as a married man?’ Porky was staring balefully at the screen of his smartphone as he muttered, ‘I don’t know. Can’t think. You decide bhai or ask half ticket.’
Suddenly half ticket spoke, ‘I think a bottle of premium scotch will be just fine.’ The three of us looked at him with surprise on our faces. He made sense and had suggested what could be considered as a gift for men. But just because we couldn’t possibly let half ticket get away with applause so cheaply, porky said, ‘Give us five good reasons why a premium scotch will suffice?’
Half ticket smiled and told us that a premium scotch as gift was like poetry and had the same surreal intoxication that a great rhyme gives… and before it all became too heavy for us to handle, he listed out the five reasons by writing them all out on a piece of paper:
- Gives you new and sparkling ideas
- Make you talk about the real self that otherwise remains hidden
- Fun is in when you taste it, savour it and discover it
- Makes you look at the world in a new way
- It is big entertainment in a small container
And after writing down his five mantras, half ticket looked up triumphantly and said, ‘So you see, like poetry, scotch introduces us to a new brilliance, opens us up to new experiences, and brings real fun closer.’
‘He’s right,’ I said, and then added, ‘and like a good poem it comes gurgling out of a manageable bottle singing a song. Quite unlike facing a novel with 200 pages to negotiate before you think you like it. You’ve hit the nail, buddy.’
So yes, poetry intoxicates… almost like scotch does, gently and with no sudden swerves or brakes to put you off balance. No wonder then that it is the Gaelic word uisage beatha that is responsible for whisky. The Gaelic word itself originates from the Latin Acqua Vitae or water of life. Well, anything that claims to be like the ‘water of life’ cannot possibly be prosaic enough to suck all the fun out of living moments. And if this doesn’t qualify it as sublime poetry, what else will?
So this was how half ticket helped us decide our gift for our friend… and I must admit here that since then we now call every great idea for a gift a half ticket as a good decision is precisely that. The other half of the ticket is going ahead to find and buy it, of course.
So, the next time you think of buying a perfect gift, do look out for Scotch Whisky Collection in a store nearby… and this will be like a half ticket for your decision. ?For more ideas on gifts for men and Scotch as a gift, you also have the option of visiting liveinstyle dot com… for that other half which is all about the final buying decisions.
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Disclaimer: This article is meant for readers above 25 yrs.
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#ScotchWhiskyCollection #ScotchAsGift
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Arvind Passey
09 November 2015
