What makes you remind those summer afternoons of childhood?
The constant trilling of birds, the meows of cats, the distant barking of dogs, the honking of cars and ice-cream…. Oh, just rewind the film of your life and try to remember those days when we used to eat that bar coated with chocolate. Yup “A Choc Bar” by Polka. That sweet and cool snack for our sweet tooth. Many of us remember that ice-cream.
Though our taste buds forget that flavor with the passage of time but beautiful sweet memories are associated with that phase of life. How cousins during vacations crave for choc bar and other flavors of Polka. I still remember Cassata ice-cream with three flavors, pistachio (chocolate), vanilla and strawberry, packed in paper packing. Few other flavors were Jet Sport, Pop Cone, Mango ice-cream, and Kings Kulfa. The non-plastic ice-cream container era.
I remember how choc bar melts down and one has to lick it fast to keep it from dripping down onto the floor. And that chocolate encasing which just melts in the mouth.
The impermanence of life is just like the impermanence of ice-cream.
Wall’s Ice-cream:Ice-cream or Frozen Dessert
And then Wall’s made an entry with a bang and we all gradually became addicted to it. Wall’s provided new deep freezers to retailers and ice-cream vendors were also equipped with high quality freezers, and it became increasingly difficult for polka to remain in competition. [In 1994 Lever Brothers Pakistan made an offer of Rs 600 million to Polka but it demanded Rs one billion. Almost one year after the launch of Wall’s ice-cream in 1995, Polka offered a merger of two companies.]
The solid biscuit base of ‘Cornetto’ helped us linger on the taste of cone ice-cream which always get softened, and ultimately a rivulet of liquid started running down from its bottom. “Cornetto and Feast” were the popular ones and their prices were a bit higher than the others. The feast we had on Cornetto (means a little horn) and Feast was among the sweet treats of that beautiful era.
After a lapse of almost two decades, it became evident that those ice-creams were nothing but frozen dessert. Nowadays, Hico is being increasingly liked by the public because it’s made from pure milk. “Hico, founded in 1952, started as a small tricycle vending business with hawkers roaming the city of Lahore.”
The impermanence of life is just like the impermanence of ice-cream. Sweet treats of good old days were replaced by the new ones. Life is just like it. New generation replaces the previous one, until one day they’ll all perish. So seldom I get to take a peek through the window of memories and it’s like reliving those days when we’re kids and wanted to fly like birds.
