A Thousand Drinks Later

The frothiness of an egg white texturing a Pisco Sour. The dash of bitters in an Old Fashioned. The orange peel accentuating a Negroni. The fresh coffee beans in an Espresso Martini. A cocktail isn’t ingredients. It’s details. It’s care. It’s craft.

Over the course of my RC year, I’ve made well over a thousand drinks, hastily but lovingly. The commotion of ingredients and ice, as the body of a drink comes together in an incorporation shake. The chilled ice cools the metal, permeating into your fingers as if through convection. The shaking is thunderous for the first few drinks, and slowly fades into just a hum as the evening unfolds with the crescendo of chatter.

There’s this exhilarating pace of requests intercepting queues and eyeing the empty glass, anticipating the next round. Loneliness is a funny thing in crowds, and even stranger in company. I’ve found that you can’t be lonely in the flow of a craft. You can’t be lonely, if you are too busy to feel. Sometimes, there’s a soliloquy, a deep ruminating bass narrating this Freudian stream of conscious introspecting all that is laid bare in front of you. This longing to be useful. This longing to give. It’s an identity of sorts, as a world, hotter, madder, faster, absolves us of meaning.

A cocktail is an act of defiance in the pantheon of capitalism. The commitment of a pour in a world obsessed with optionality. The frivolousness of garnish amidst the trimming of fat. A drink is homage to labor and earth. The smokiness of a Mezcal from a traditional agave farm in Jalisco. The effervescence of a Prosecco from grapes cultivated in a Trento Vineyard. The intensity of a homemade Hungarian palinka passed through a family. The memories I carry as I pay homage.

I’m often asked, why is it that I enjoy making cocktails? At some level it’s the making of something literal, not knowledge work, not bits and bytes, a material thing, a physical thing. It’s a feeling my soft, uncalloused hands rarely experience.

On a deeper, subliminal level, it’s a form of grappling with the hollowness of being a neoliberal workhorse, a hollowness that no amount of consumption can fill. It’s the realization that somewhere along the way I shed my values, acquiesced to the inequity and endless woes of a forsaken world, and labeled it pragmatism. I’m pouring myself and others a sedative. A sedative is what you need, when you have the awareness to see injustice, the morality to care, and the cowardice to do nothing meaningful at all. The ambrosia is ephemeral, and it kills you slowly.

The beauty of a cocktail is that it disarms us into the essence of our being. Bolder than words unvarnished on martini olives and messier than the resin of spilled Aperol, the rawness of our vulnerability and aberrations on full display. The armoring of pedigree cannot fill the vacancy of a soul. We are thinking souls, but we are also feeling souls. A drink is a carousel of nostalgia and premonition. It’s an introspection and confrontation. It’s an unwinding like the unbuttoning of a collar. It’s sustenance for our feeling souls, souls far too easy to starve.

Here’s to the next thousand drinks. Onward.

Aurnov Chattopadhyay (MBA ‘27), prior to HBS, worked in product management at Microsoft and Goldman Sachs. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Columbia University and master’s in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.