SOME BRANDS HAVE CONSUMERS. OLD MONK HAS BELIEVERS.
A month and some ago, the regulators stood up and told the entire country that Old Monk could not be sold as rum. Neutral spirit with rum flavouring, they said. A “rum-flavoured spirit”, at best. And the “7 Years Old Blended” on the label? Misleading. And they’re absolutely right. That’s their job, and they did it. The label will change, as it should. But here is what no ruling can touch. For those of us who believe, little of it matters, because the love affair was never with a claim printed on a label. It was with the taste, the brand and everything it stood for. On that, nothing has changed for me, or for any OG I know.
I have loved this drink for over thirty years. Through college, band days, heartbreaks, terrible parties, legendary nights and every questionable decision in between.
But it didn’t start with the Monk. Back then, it was DSP Black, Director’s Special, the usual suspects of every nineties student budget. Then came the St Xavier’s hostel afternoons, when Brahma was a sweaty college band rehearsing like our lives depended on it, because they did. And there was Naveen Salian. Naveen ran Virgo, the label that would go on to sign our first album, The World Beyond, in 1998, and his evening Cielo came with something I’ve never seen before or since. A bar in the boot. One bottle of Old Monk, four glasses, an ice pail, cut lime, the works. And this man, this label boss we were all trying to impress, would pop that boot and pour a bunch of sweaty kids a glass after rehearsal, like it was the most natural thing in the world. That was the moment everything gravitated to the Monk. Not the taste, not the price. The ritual of it. The generosity of it. A drink that turned a car boot into the most important boardroom of my early life.
What nobody tells you is that the Monk comes with a lifetime membership to India’s longest-running argument. Neat or cola. Cola or water. Ice or no ice. Grown men with demat accounts will nearly come to blows over it. You can’t have fierce opinions about a drink without personality, and Monk is all personality.
Then life happened. Corporate guy by day, Brahma by night, and the Monk was there for both. Post-gig drink, rehearsal-room drink, we-got-the-deal drink and we-lost-the-deal drink, often in the same week. A full decade of it.
Then the business took me around the world, and the world drinks very well. Great red wines. Twelve-, fifteen-, eighteen-year old single malts. Rare tequilas. I enjoyed all of it. I’m not a savage.
And then, about two years ago, I got healthy. Trainer, strength training, a whole lot of weight lost, and logically Old Monk should have been the first thing to go. The sugar alone. I drank it with Diet Coke, for God’s sake. If any drink was getting cut, it was this one. Except, somehow, it never seemed to add weight. And it came with the famous clear head, the no-hangover morning every Monk drinker swears by as if it were gospel.
So without ever deciding it, the Monk became my steady drink. Call it the second coming. In two years, maybe ten nights of anything else, and those were overseas, where they don’t stock it. A decade of Monk in my youth, everything else in between, and then back to the OG. The Monk is now my partner in weight loss and health, which is arguably the most bizarre thing anyone could tell you about a rum. Sorry. A rum-flavoured spirit.
When the ruling came, Mumbai didn’t have it. Shelves emptied overnight. But my wife and I recently built a house in Goa, where the Monk flows freely, so I hoarded like a madman. Every weekend, another run. Including the incredible two-litre bottle they make only for Goa, and I have ten, fifteen of those alone, plus every size, shape and variant they bottle. My bar now looks like a hedge fund bunker, if hedge funds were denominated in dark rum. Call it panic-buying. I call it protecting my portfolio.
So what is it? If it isn’t even technically rum, how does a student-budget drink hold its own against everything that came after?
It’s not the taste, though all that vanilla and caramel and mischief is genuinely good. It’s that Old Monk was never a drink at all. It’s time travel. One sip and you’re back in that hostel room, at that terrible party that became a legendary night, standing by an open car boot with a glass in your hand and your whole life in front of you. Every other bottle in my bar tells me where I’ve been. Monk reminds me who I was.
My father, a computer scientist who built mainframes for Indian defence, instilled in me this Bengaliness, this lower middle-class state of mind that never leaves you. I was born with it, still carry it today and will probably die with it. Maybe that’s the real answer. Old Monk is the lower middle-class state of mind, bottled. Honest, unpretentious, priced for everyone. It never asked to be called premium. It just outlasted everything that did.
That’s the bit no lab report can measure. You can put the liquid in a machine and tell me it’s neutral spirit with flavouring. Fine. But put it in a glass on a winter evening with an old friend and it becomes the entire nineties, bottled.
Old Monk will quietly go back to being what it has always been. Not a rum. Not a “rum-flavoured spirit”. A rite of passage. You can’t regulate that, and you can’t fake it either, which is why a hundred new brands with a hundred new campaigns will never catch it.
Some brands have consumers. Old Monk has believers. And this believer’s only real problem with the whole business is that it did nothing about the actual scandal, which is that some people still put soda in it.
Cheers, Monk. Whatever you are.
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