SuMmEr - A study in light and black.

Summer brings limpid liquid memories...The Speshul drinks of Madurai:
1. Bovonto: For the unitiated, the taste of Bovonto (manufactured by "Kalimark",no less ;-) resembles at times cough syrup and at other times thick grape juice. But only the truest of tongues can detect the evolution of what was originally ginger ale. Bovonto is a dark, sweet fizzy drink manufactured in south Tamil Nadu by Kalimark. Remarkably, the brand is still strong in south TN despite heavy dumping and pumping of stocks by Pepsi/Coke etc. Bovonto,IMHO,anyday tastes better than Pepsi or Coke ...sigh, if only Kalimark had the millions to take on Shahrukh and Trisha! During my MBA, one of my fav dream projects was to craft a deadly marketing strategy for Bovonto that would see it reign the market share charts in South India...sadly, it remained a dream, as did the rebranding of the TVS Suzuki Fiero. When mixed with rum, such dark heaven swirled around in that glass that one could happily down 5-6 glasses without detecting anything amiss. Every Madurai visit sees me popping a couple of bottles of Bo-von-toh!
Last known rate: Rs.10 for 300 ml, Rs.20 for 500 ml (PS: I just love the fact that they price it at a premium to Pepsi!)

2. Fruit miksher: Yes, thats the way any self respecting shop of Madurai would spell it...this thick slushy drink filled with assorted fruits is available in the umpteen juice shops around the Meenakshi-amman temple in Madurai. With a scary orange colour that turns away most of the foreigners and "seths"(as Northies are called in Madurai), Fruit Miksher is savoured by the hundreds of Tamils who throng the busy lanes of Madurai, having come in from distant villages to shop for sarees and shirts. I have never bothered to ask what Fruit Mixsher is made of...after a long walk in the dry dusty streets of Madurai with Rs.10 in your pocket,a fruit mixsher is your best friend that lays to rest the pangs of your hunger, the piercing thirst
and the deadly heat that threatens to suck your soul away in Maduers.
Last known rate: Rs.4/ glass

3. Paneer soda: Like Bovonto, Paneer Soda is manufactured locally in Madurai by M/s Kalimark and M/s Mappilai Vinayagar. No relative to the cheesy paneer, this is a rose-water-flavoured-sweet-soda.After a long basketball game or a 17km bike ride to
college, a paneer soda and 2 paruppu vadas were all that one needed to get the swagger back into one's walk. Paneer soda was a bit more dignified than the "Goli" soda which involved drinking your soda through a chamber with a glass marble (serious,peoples!). Unfortunately apna MNCs are slowly strangling this drink to death...grab it while it lasts.
Last known rate: Rs.6 for 200 ml bottle

4. Jil Jil Jigar Thanda: Ah,that Rajnikant were born in Madurai, this is what his blessed mother would have weaned him on...what a name,huh...WHAT-A-NAME! A white mix of seaweed, milk and other never-to-be named ingredients, jil jil JIGAR THANDA was
usually available near the Tamukkam ground where the annual summer exhibition was held. This exhibition,was by and large the best possible entertainment for the peoples of Madurai and you could make out entire villages visiting this event over the weekend. Imagine a nosiy loudspeaker filled mela conducted in a ground with proper stalls and policemen at the entrance, that was the "chitrai porutkaatchi"-the annual summer exhibition @ Madurai. And jil jil jigar thanda did roaring business during these months, cooling down thousands of frayed tempers, tearful eyes and the occassional village belle, for whom the lads clamoured to buy this treasured liquid pleasure.
Last known rate: Rs.5/ small glass.

Apart from these super speshul drinks, summers brought other charms into our lives:

5. The Annual YMCA camp: This was the one fantastic thing that the Madurai YMCA organized every summer. The YMCA summer camps were toatal fun because my dad made sure some of my cousins were also enrolled into them. In the first camp, I played
football...14 fat,thin,lean,mean boys and a tiny tot of a skirted girl! We later came to know that this feisty character was the daughter of the proprietor of one of the biggest hotels in town, The Pandian Hotel (long buried into oblivion since). The
man was decent enough to sponsor sandwiches during those 15 days, so we always treated the girl with some respect. Camp was where I felt a seniors spike leave dark scars on my ankle, camp was where 10 of us fell in love with a 12 year old chess
player-Krithika, camp was where I started crying for no reason because Ashok, my best friend fell down...camp was where I learnt "Oh my darling Clementine" and "My bonnie lies over the ocean". Exhilarating fun was camp...thank god for Harris Manickam of the YMCA who almost flawlessly organized them, year after year.

6. Cousins: This was easily the best part about the summers. Whether cousins came over to our place or we went over to theirs, the kind of fun that one had during those days was mind-boggling for the sheer variety if nothing else. My cousins
taught me how to spin a top and break another's in "aakher", how to fly kites with powdered glass pasted on the strings,how to dig out scorpions, how to make a chameleon dance with snuff powder, how to smoke a cigarette, how to drive a cycle, how to swing on a gate with 3 other kids clinging on to it, how a turtle bites,how to carry a rabbit...my cousins were an absolutely smashing lot! We did not know nor did we care about the hajaar things that our fathers and mothers argued about...all we knew was that we had to come back for lunch and dinner. The rest of the day was spent in roaming the bylanes of Palayankottai, the slopes of the Nagamalai and the sodium vapour lit streets of Ellis Nagar. Now we are worlds apart and don't know what we have become, each a stranger in a strange world with only the past to weakly weave us together from time to marriage time.

7. I Know What You Did Last Summer: Summer was the title of one of my earliest poems durng a session at the British Council at Madras...a time when I looked at the world through what I imagined were the bloodied doors of perception. I specialized in what I called "poetrie noire" and wrote such bile-filled black stuff that an old lady once asked me if my soul was as dark as my poems...typical of that age, I said "Yours is not to reason why, yours is but to do and die" and turned away. Yeats in "The
Second Coming" wrote that "the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity"...that was me,then, intense blasphemic rage and rant, without a reason,with a rhyme. Since then, we've come a long way. Hopefully,GFM.

SETTING FIRE TO SUMMER
- Ganja Turtle
Summer was one of the nights
A drunken man raped a disabled kid
In the Metro
With 12 Mumbaikars watching
Proud race they be.

Summer was one of the days
Ryan O' Connor loved Gloria Axelrod
And won 3 bullets for his love.
The first 2 at the back of his knees
After one hour of
Bleeding,
Gasping,
Crawling,
Creeping,
The 3rd one to his head.
Catholics can't fall in love with Protestants.
Not in Ireland.
F#$%$ Jesus.

Summer was the twilight
When Sun burnt the air,
Water killed the fishes,
Mud dried into cracks,
And Space was filled with
A thousand screams
Begging respite.

Lets burn summer.

- Tagged by Lady Silverine...if only I could find one more to close the list, but then again thats the way life is ;-)