my goli soda days

                I am getting old :)  Dont give me advice or make fun of me . I am still 17 years young :)

What i meant is i am thinking backwards often especially about the good old days in food .Not that i dont like any of the food these days but some of the items i do miss nostalgically .

One of them is the goli soda . The soda which was in a green bottle and which you had a marble in it which you squeezed with your finger to open it . Not that current sodas are filled with anything else at least that had "pure carbon dioxide " and the sherbets with lime had a special taste when made with it . And that gave you good company in good as well as bad days ..In good days i used to have it from the corner tea shop and on bad days ( i mean the stomach upset days ) this soda with lime and salt with ginger calmed my angry stomach .

And then there were the green and red parrys muttais(toffees ) . Maybe the hard caramel it was hard work to crush it with your teeth and savour the taste unlike the readymade toffees which melt in your mouth . Of course the poppins which was its friend is still available but these green and red parrys muttais disappeared long back .

There was a short period when i was studying in a good private school but 10 minutes in lunch hour i was literally begging . In those days we didnt get pocket money and we were not allowed to buy the fruits which were salted and sold near the school for a few paise . So many of us used to go and literally beg her for a piece of fruit and they used to give us a piece more out of pestering . Nowadays also we get those fruits like mangoes but fruits like lanthapazham etc i hardly see these days . And the taste of a fruit got after intense begging/pestering is different . Even more sweet was the ice mittai not the company made but delivered in bicycles with boiled semiya topping . Thought to be "unhygeinic " they were totally banned by our uncle who studied in same school years back . But occasionally i tasted this heavenly ice stick keeping an eye faraway whether my uncle was around .

Naranga mittai , gas mittai etc in the big bottles of  the ubiquitous teashops made our day . But still when my aunt from america long ago asked what i wanted from there i was about to tell " Coca Cola " because that was not available in india then . Now we have Coca Cola but i miss all those which i got in my childhood . Not with a sense of loss as we have lots of tasty things these days but i want at least the green parrys mittai . Is it greed ?  Tell me what you think :)