When the bottle's lost and won

There’s an app for that.

Is this the line of the decade? There isn’t a stone that lies unturned by an app. The app built the mobile revolution, or in William Blake’s words, placed “infinity in the palm of your hand”*.?

Ecommerce apps run our lives, giving us pyjamas to parathas and plumbers. Thank heaven for it.?

But there’s something about alcohol—the fun stuff in bottles—that changes our easy relationship with commerce.?

Imagine this. You open an app, place an order. An hour later, a sealed bag shows up at your door. The bag has: a bottle of Italian wine, a Barolo (because you are a fancy person, Rs 5500), two bottles of Old Monk rum (because it’s daily rations, Rs 740) and six bottles of Tuborg beer (because it’s June in the plains, Rs 770).?

Something doesn’t seem right about that scenario. It’s an uneasy feeling. You delight in the thought, but look left, right and left again before opening the package.?

It feels too good to be true, so it probably is. Illicit or even illegal, immodest, ill-something. Unless it’s a party and you’re two bottles short at a late hour; in which case the deed, as Macbeth**?would advise for murder, is best done quickly.?

There’s baggage to deal with.?

We have a relationship with alcoholic drinks that’s shot through with conflict. Drinking alcohol is a shady business, enjoyed and reviled.

From the ancients to Tolstoy and Gandhi, the drinker’s pleasure has always fought the demagogue’s warnings.?

But the hypocrisy is what’s special.

At home, elders with a glass in hand forbid youngsters from drinking. Some elders claim booze is medicine. For a private illness that the young, naturally, do not suffer from.?

Governments enforce a ‘hypocracy’. They live off the vast tax revenue that liquor generates, but the tax is not on goods but on ‘bads’. Consumption is under moral attack, with a calendar of dry days, and deadly retail regulations. Several states have enforced prohibition.

In this miasmic climate, wine shops have become seedy places. You don’t so much buy a bottle but escape with one. In smaller towns, preferably wrapped in newspaper.?(What’s inside the paper is louder than the headlines). It feels illicit.??

An e-commerce app changes that. Home delivery gives?great convenience. It spares us from queues and the contact sport that booze buying can be.

As importantly, apps offer privacy. But yet the aura of a forbidden pleasure remains. It still feels illicit!

Joy to the world, Sip is born

It’s this world into which Sip, the alcoholic drinks delivery app, is born. The newborn must learn to breathe and survive the toxic atmosphere.

It must grow up and carry the message that alcohol can be a joy, not a curse. That buying it is normal. That you needn’t look left, right, and left again when the sealed bag arrives.

There’s a brand for that.

Branding can help change the conversation. Sip is not the first Alco-Bev delivery app in India. But probably the first one to take a stand on drinking culture.??

In the world that Sip fabricates and proposes (what else do brands do?), alcohol is part of the natural order of things. The weather is light, airy and always balmy, everyday.?A bird delivers the booze.

The bird is the brand’s mascot, Sippy. It flies around town with a red grocery bag full of the good stuff. The unspoken message is that drinking is a joy, a part of a good life.?

It’s ok, it seems to say, to order an Old Monk on a Monday. Like dal, chawal or atta.??

The app doesn’t encourage drinking, but it does remove the taboos that we’ve been wearing like leg-irons.?

Libation is liberation.?

Sip in peace!

Itu

________

*Auguries of Innocence’, William Blake

**If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly’, Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 7

There's a rap for that

We had a Jamaican Rastafarian fly down to sing the joys of Sip. Listen in:?Sip at ICD ft. Mob Barley.

A universe that conspires to deliver your drink

A bird drops your bottle from the sky, a cat climbs up your windows or a monkey swings it from a tree—welcome to a new world.