Boozers in Kerala may not feel “lost” anymore. They won’t have to go asking around about the nearest liquor outlet when they are in a strange place or feel anxious whether the money in hand will suffice for the brand they want. Kuppi (bottle), a new app on their Android smart phones, will tell them everything they need to know about booze in God’s Own Country.
The app, which can be downloaded free from the Google Playstore, is a virtual encyclopedia as far as boozers in Kerala are concerned. It will guide the drinker to the nearest liquor outlet of the State-run Kerala State Beverage Corporation with the help of map and address, supported with elaborate information on road network.
Kuppi is a storehouse of information on all types of liquor — Brandy, Whiskey, Rum, Gin, Vodka, etc — complete with the prices of the available brands for bottles of specific volumes. It will also tell the user what volume of which brand he will get for the money he has in hand at a particular time.
Under the option “What You Get” in the app, the user enters the money available in hand at the particular time. He will then press the “Get list” option to see on the screen the list of liquor brands he can buy with the money he has in the pocket at that time. “It is easy to use just like any other app,” said Ramesh, an IT engineer who downloaded Kuppi for fun.
Kuppi has a full list of all the 387 outlets of the Beverages Corporation in the State. It also shows a list of “dry days” in Kerala when the booze shops remain closed. “It should be extremely useful to a boozer,” says Joseph, a Kochi-based stationer who is yet to understand what made him download Kuppi. “But the question is how many users actually want it,” he adds.
The most interesting highlight of the app, however, should be the section for Kuppi Pazhamchollukal (sayings about the bottle), hilarious ‘proverbs’ about booze, boozers and their etiquette. Some read like: “Only those boozers who queue up get liquor” and “Never mind the brand what matters is whether the drink is good.”
However, the developers of the app have shown their social responsibility by stating that their intention was only the creation of an app and it is not their goal to promote boozing. To make their intention clearer, the user comes across the statutory warning, along with the picture of the Kuppi, that drinking alcohol is injurious to health.
The app developers, leo Softwares, do not take any credit for their job. “All data, photos, Pazhamchollukal and codes we used in this app have been taken from the Internet. All credit goes to their respective creators. We created nothing (but had) just assembled all the things we got from the Net,” they said.
Though thousands had downloaded Kuppi within hours of its launch through Google Playstore last week, criticisms have already come up against it. One of the main criticisms is that Kuppi is the most modern remote implement for destroying families in a society that has already been ravaged by booze. Kerala tops the list of States in per-capital liquor consumption in the country.
Majority of those downloaded Kuppi seem to belong to the IT sector. However, they say that this does not imply that majority of boozers in the State belong to their field. “It is just that most of them have done it for fun and also smart phones are widely used among us,” said Basil P, a computer engineer in Kochi.