Asif Khan Inc.

Age, Responsibility and Johnnie Walker

‘With age comes responsibility…’

Now I wouldn’t really know if that is what Johnnie Walker had in mind when the ‘Striding Man Society’ was formed to celebrate ‘forward thinking and the pursuit of excellence’ (pursuit! excellence?), something which apparently provides a perfect embodiment of the spirit of ‘Keep Walking’ after downing glugs of alcohol which has been aged to perfection. It leaves me to wonder however, that how is it that the marketing gurus and brand communication teams missed out on adding one simple word which carries the world’s weight (if not more) within itself – ‘Keep Walking – Responsibly‘ – how absolutely irresponsible, an act which may be given a reprieve from almost certain castigation at this point considering that they might have been dead drunk out of their wits in some obscure Scottish tavern (and probably trying to inch their way up the skirt of the BBW sitting right across the table), and how absolutely abhorrently ludicrous to expect merrily hic-ing disciples of Bacchus to keep walking when you expect to sell over 10 million bottles a month! And thus I have successfully sketched a vicious circle which is probably not as perfect as the ones we made in our geometry classes with a compass, but more earth-like, flattened around the edges (perfection ain’t anyone’s forte anyway, and personally speaking I am the one who is sketching the circle here, and I like it a little imperfect). You consume (yes, after all that’s what we need to do to sustain our existence and elevate ourselves from the drudgery of our lives) and then you need to walk too, and forward in pursuit of excellence, with a fair degree of responsibility lest you are made to take a breathalyzer, all the while making sure you don’t fall into a honey trap planted on the way (not on the way exactly, but yeah could be, assuming that the cement grate covering it has been taken away by someone (which might as well have been you looking the other way) seeking his daily fix earlier in the preceding hours).

Having said that however, I feel a twinge of having been a bit unfair to these guys…after all, isn’t that what Life dishes out to us too…your drink is aged to perfection in proportion to the years you have walked the terrain surrounding you and your ‘trip’ is fuelled by an ambrosiac high fed to you which levitates you to a proportionate level, which in turn manifests itself in the way your personal metabolism wishes to process it, which does make matters of gravity and levitation a bit mixed up considering that the external manifestation may result in levels getting switched to a disproportionate one bringing forth susceptibilities of collisions and alienation.

So what does a close-to-30 years old do who swings between extremes of the levitational and gravitational spectrum, and although a certain Mr. Armstrong may say ‘My shadow’s only one that walks beside me’, I guess the shadow’s gonna have a tough time keeping up with the wicked concoction of metaphysically grown pharmaceuticals, resulting in the guy moving about without a shadow, which is how it should be in case Mr. Armstrong truly aspires to ‘walk alone, I walk a—’…so I’d say walk on dude, keep walking and walk responsibly for with age comes responsibility.

But Billie Joe says this too somewhere else:

 I don’t feel any shame I won’t apologise
When there ain’t nowhere you can go