Drink of Choice

Got Piss?

Mmmmmm. You know what I need right now? A great big stinking cup of cow piss. Yep, hard to think of a drink more wholesome and refreshing.

Remember the health-nut fad that lasted through most of the 70's? People were eating and drinking all kinds of things. Some of them were normal, most of them consisted in avoiding certain food items or groups, and some of them had us living on seaweed crepes and mineral water. One of the most bizarre of those was dairy products fad. Eat eggs and milk and cheese and you can live to be 100 years old. Sheesh, I never had to worry too much about that one as I am terribly allergic to cow milk, but at least those were foods that you can actually buy in a regular supermarket.

All of which brings me to Hyderabad, India:

Till a few days ago, signposts announcing "Filtered and pure gomutram available" or "Chilled gomutram available" could be seen outside restaurants and bakeries. Those have gone now, thanks to the taxman and a science awareness group who raised uncomfortable questions.

Gomutram, huh? Gomutram means "cow piss" in English. It spells yuck in just about any place on the earth except for Hyderabad. It reinforces my strong beliefs in:

A. reading the bottle carefully
B. not believing everything that you read, and
C. for the love of God do not drink urine.

At least there are reasonable people there who want to rid their neighborhoods of this bizarre habit. It is my belief that you do not have to be a scientist to have enough sense to not put urine in your mouth. Do not eat dung, do not eat glass, and do not drink radioactive waste, unless you are seeking super-human powers. A few pointers for the non-scientists out there that do not seem to have any sense at all.

In the late 1870's there was an expedition sent out into the high plains to punish a group of Commanches that had ventured out of Oklahoma to look for all the buffalo that had somehow disappeared, and the soldiers ran out of water. They finally resorted to drinking the blood of their horses and, yes, finally the urine. You could have asked any of the survivors if drinking urine was a good idea, and the answer would have invariably been "HELL NO!" Survival experts will tell you that if you resort to that you are going to die even faster than if you did not drink urine. Urine is not for drinking, period. Do not do it.

Some cave man in the distant past was the first to drink milk. That had to be hard enough. "Hey, there is stuff coming out of this goat when I squeeze this little thingy here. I wonder if I can drink it?" His friends were no doubt appalled at first, because they had seen what else was being squirted out by the same animal. Piss evidently never made the list.

Now, besides desperation, what would drive an otherwise rational human being to do this:

"Most of our customers are diabetics and cancer patients," says Balagopala Swamy, who stocks cow urine along with fruits and vegetables at his counter in Indira Park. Many customers don't want to take the sachets home fearing the family's reaction and drink it at the park itself, he adds.

Scenario: A man comes home from work, sees his lovely wife, takes a big swig of gomutram and wants a welcome home kiss. Right. No wonder they hide this incredible habit. How about the smell?

A few suppliers even have suggestions for battling the odor. "You can kill the smell if you add some essence while consuming it. But if you store it in a bottle again, the odor returns," says Lakshmanananda of another ashram in Gandipet, on the outskirts of the city.

OK, so it even stinks like piss because, well, it is. What, place a few drops of lemon in there and pretend it is lemonade? I am thinking this little fad needs to pass right on by.