Page 6 - Seniorstoday May 2022 Issue

Cover Story – First Person

A taste of summers

gone by…

Vickram Sethi takes a nostalgic look back at his childhood summers, and
reveals that ice-cream and cold drinks were the heroes of the season and
the world was a great place to be in…

The concept of summer is very different through a botched up tonsils operation and
in India, vis-a-vis the west. In Europe, almost lost my voice for two days but after
the gardens are in full bloom, flowers eating a lot of ice-cream and wolfing down
everywhere, restaurants, pubs, street cafés cold milkshakes, my voice finally returned.
are full of people. Families bring out their My earliest memories are of an orange
picnic baskets, the meadows, the parks have ice-cream that cost 25 paisa, A Choco bar
children running around, there are plenty was vanilla ice-cream with chocolate cover
of great street music gigs and dancing and on it that cost 50 paisa, and for 10 paisa
the world is having a party. Everyone has you could get a little plastic tube with a
summer holiday plans including the taxi sweetened frozen water called Popsicle.
driver and your building janitor. In India,
summer is a very cruel season — people
die of sun stroke, heat stroke and a lot
of diseases that sprout up because of the
extreme heat. In some parts of central India,
temperatures go beyond 45/48. One can
probably fry an egg on the runway.
Summer is a time to eat ice-cream. There is
a eureka moment in every child’s life when
he is introduced to an ice-cream. I went

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