Every society draws a line somewhere between pleasure and ruin. Valluvar draws his at the lip of the cup. This chapter is not a temperance sermon — it is a forensic examination of what alcohol actually costs, conducted with the cold eye of a prosecutor building a case. He begins with reputation, the thing a public figure cannot recover once lost. He moves through shame, stupidity, the death of the body's own awareness, and arrives at the chapter's most devastating insight: the drunkard who hides his habit has already confessed to it. The argument never moralizes in the abstract. Each kural names a specific price — the fear enemies no longer feel, the mother who cannot bear to watch, the money exchanged for oblivion, the neighbors who already know — until the final couplet delivers the cruelest observation of all: even the drunkard, in his sober moments, sees the truth. He just refuses to apply it to himself.