beat the summer heat

sadhuji

As the month of March draws to a close, the financial year comes to an end and we can feel summer creeping on us. Keeping the clothes on is uncomfortable and, to increase the comfort levels, we sprinkle prickly heat powder on our bodies and put on light color cotton clothes – the scientific reasons are that light color reflects light rather than absorbs them while cotton allows the pores of the skin to breathe in air. The footwear also comes down to the level of slip-ons or canvas. To ensure protection against getting hot headed, cotton caps are the solution and, it is customary to carry several changes of handkerchiefs, for obvious reasons. The preferable environments for relaxation are the air-conditioned movie houses or the shopping malls which, also, are centrally air-conditioned. These do not come for free because its cost is inbuilt into the cost of its products – that is why you pay twenty rupees for a cup of tea that you would get elsewhere for five rupees. Ads exhort you to pay only as per the MRP – but, that is not applicable to food products!

Thanda, thanda, cool, cool – yes, these and other similar jingles remind you that keeping your cool in summer is not really difficult. There are fruit juices, ice creams, lassis, sherbets – the variety is mind boggling. And, for the more discerning, there are the combos and mocktails. The scare of branded cold drinks being contaminated is now a thing of the past – they peep at you from hoardings, they pop up during your favorite TV serial; they hit you like sixers when our cricketers take the field.

It is sad that there is no one has devoted his mind to aggressively market our very own indigenous products like the green coconut of the lassi.

With a dynamic person like Laloo-ji at the helm of affairs in the Indian railways and his enthusiasm to promote the interests of the milkmen, it would have been wonderful if he had insisted that the railways serve only lassis and not other bottled cold drinks. Even the ice creams could be replaced with kulfis and srikhand. They are tasty, they are healthy and they certainly help to beat the heat. Simultaneously, the IRCTC (Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation) could seriously consider stocking the pantry cars of long distance mail and express trains with green coconuts at the beginning of each trip, especially during the summer months.

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mooning over a moon journey