Bengaluru Restaurant Names Cocktail After Varthur Lake Pollution, This Is Not A Drill

Excerpt: Bengaluru’s Varthur Lake made headlines in 2023 after 25,000 dead fish emerged on its surface due to high contamination.

Naming drinks after places is not unusual, for instance, some of the most popular drinks such as Moscow Mule and Cape Codder are named after cities. Recently, a restaurant in Bengaluru also named a drink named after its famous lake. However, the twist is that the lake in question is known for its high contamination levels. Varthur Lake is also notorious for overflowing after rains as its water retention capacity has been reduced due to poor desiltation work by the government. Varthur Lake made headlines in 2023 after 25,000 dead fish emerged on its surface due to high contamination.

On Sunday, an X user named Arnav Gupta shared a photo of the said drink and wrote, “Bangalore Oota Company has a drink called “Varthur Overflow” which is a play on the Varthur Lake pollution incident. This city literally will make memes to the point of parody cocktails instead of fix itself.” In a follow-up post, Gupta corrected that the restaurant was Oota Whitefield.

This post soon got over 45,000 views. Commenting on it, an X user jokingly wrote, “You gotta say it’s evocative. The colour of the water, the windswept foam, the overwhelmed bridge. 100% accurate.”

Another person saw the drink as a subtle attempt at raising awareness about the lake’s dismal state and remarked, “But serves as a great reminder to the powerful people who consume it. Subtle art of persuasion I suppose.”

Someone else pointed to Bengaluru’s water shortage and wrote, “On a lighter note, Wanna see what drink they’ll make to commemorate the water shortage in the city.”

This is not the first time that Bengaluru locals have exposed the city’s civic issues with humour. Last year, an anonymous person marked the Ejipura flyover project as a “monument” on Google Maps. This was done as a satire on the flyover’s delayed construction. The Ejipura flyover’s construction started in 2017 but even after seven years, it is incomplete.

The flyover was renamed “Bangalore Stonehenge” on Google Maps. Soon locals were writing sarcastic reviews about the “Bangalore Stonehenge”. One person wrote in the review, “I’ve been seeing these structures on the road for years. No one knows why they were built. Vegetation has taken them over and ASI is in talks to declare these structures as monuments and take over their maintenance.” The “Bengalore Stonehenge” was later removed by Google Maps.