Eau dear, at what price haute water?

There’s a drinking water revolution happening out there. But in India, we’re still bottled up about it

AT 360 o , the favoured haunt of Delhi's terminally trendy lunch crowd, we had the misfortune of being seated next to a high-maintenance kitty party this Monday. All 12 kitties, er...ladies, were slim, dressed in obviously branded designerwear and nibbled delicately on Caesar's Salad or vegetarian sushi as they chatted loudly about trips to Paris and Milan. But what caught my eye wasn't their identical matt makeup or similarly coiffed hair but that they seemed to have replaced Diet Coke with...water! As the magenta-labelled bottles of Himalayan weren't opened fast enough to keep up with their (go)sipping, many of them just tap-tapped briskly on their stilettos to the bar and topped up their glasses with paani and baraf. As I picked up my own glass of water feeling distinctly au courant, I remembered some water related incidents that may have been prophetic! There's been a significant change in attitudes towards water in the west, at least in the past decade that I've been observing it. Has India caught up with this water mania? Slumming it at our favourite downbeat Chinatown eatery in London's Soho area in the mid-1990s, it was always a pain to get water. It became a wearying cantation: “Could we have water, please? Water. Still water. Plain tap water in fact.” It needed several repetitions before glasses arrived and we said it so often that it was indelibly imprinted on our four-year-old's mind. One day he embarrassed us all by repeating it ad verbatim (including the weary tone) to a bewildered friend who asked him what he would like to drink... Cut to London 2006. At the local Waitrose, the non-alcoholic beverages section had as many brands of water (including Evian in 2-litre packs) as colas. And as we lunched with our now-teenaged son at the fashionable restaurant called The Ivy, more bottles of Hildon spring water stood on celeb tables than expensive wines. Iqbal Wahhab of London’s Cinnamon Club says, “Water sales are massive and growing. In London we’re a boozy lot, so it’s wine and water on restaurant tables. New Yorkers don’t drink much wine at lunchtime so they pour bottles of water like there’s no tomorrow.” Little wonder then that beverages lists at many tony eateries included water sections too - still, artesian, spring, sparkling, mineral, glacial, you name it. They are even categorised regionally - European, American, Asian water - and by taste and texture! In fact, Wahhab insists tht a “small bottle of water is a must-have accessory along with an iPod and a Blackberry.” But before you coo, “Aaah, how eco-friendly!”, imagine how many tons of carbon gases are emitted flying those distinctive bottles of “fresh spring water” across the world to fashionable haunts. That's why, even as bottled water sales worldwide have hit $1 billion, there's a counter-revolution in cool cities like New York in favour of plain tap water; many topselling brands are nothing but bottled, purified municipal water anyway! But since our rising bottled water sales are largely due to fears about the quality of the stuff supplied by our municipal water utilities rather than fashion, tap water drinking has expectedly not caught on. In India, therefore, we have a piquant situation. We want to be seen drinking the right stuff but premium imported brands Perrier and San Pellegrino have come - and gone. Evian is still hanging in there. Only just. The first two probably didn't succeed because they were sparkling and we prefer still water; we keep the fizzy stuff for whisky or nimbu. Evian (still) passes muster, but that's because its price imbues it with a special aura! So, as hotels and top notch restaurants in India spruce up their wines and spirits lists, water brands are conspicuous by their absence. Water’s just not haute enough here, yet say Delhi and Mumbai restaurateurs. So water drinkers stick to desi mineral water brands . Will India ever join the international drinking water revolution? Sadly, for that we have to depend on quality improvement by sarkari water mandarins. Eau dear.

Courtesy: EconomicTimes

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