My Childhood Brands

When I look back at my childhood days, I recall people less clearly than things. I remember erasers, called rubbers, with fragrance made of opaque rubber, particularly an inexpensive eraser Sandow. There were so many soaps that the pages of middle-class India in the nineteen sixties may be written in soap and detergents. The only detergent that has survived as a brand from then is Surf. The word 'detergent' was not used back then. Surf was detergent as it became the generic word for all powdered soaps that came in a box. No one had heard of Rin and Nirma. Red Lifebuoy just could not be overlooked. Hamam and the green Cinthol were the bars to bathe with except for people with higher aspirations who purchased Moti, a fat round soap that was rather large for small hands or perhaps Pears which was considered posh; any household that used Pears regularly was not deemed middle class. Classes in society were distinguished for buying crates of Coca Cola rather than individual bottles. Cans had not been introduced in the market then. The classes were also separated from their children reading fudgy Commando comics versus the illustrated classics or the TinTin comic books. The midpoint was Tarzan and Batman comics. Other from soaps, our childhood was outlined by toothpaste. Almost everyone used Colgate and that has not changed much even today. For a while, Binaca Green was real competition, thanks to Ameen Sayani’s Binaca Geet Mala. There were diversions in the form of old men with a giant single-stringed instrument that looked like a bow called 'ektara' and made a deep thrumming sound which was amusing for about five minutes before you realized that it was the only sound it could make. Summer always brought the `gannawala’ or the sugar-cane man who kept his cart outside the house and ran giant canes, sometimes six at a time, through the press. Then he would double those husked sticks and run them through again. The juice ran through a sieve into an aluminium vessel. In ice creams, Kwality was leading the pack with Havmor’s Tutti Frutti also widely popular. There were no signs of London Dairy, Haagen Dazs or Baskin Robbins. The Vadilals were not born yet. Apart from ice cream, Orange bars, HMV records, Godrej refrigerators, Bond paper, Cadbury's Fruit & Nut were those brands that you simply could not ignore. Wrigley's Spearmint, Quality Street and Kraft cheese were the goodies that resulted as gifts from returning family members who travelled abroad. At home, Kathiawar Stores still gave us the blue tin boxes of Britannia’s ginger biscuits. Not many elders have forgotten that taste. It still lingers in their mouth. For tennis lovers, nothing was more appropriate than a can of Dunlop tennis balls. Unlike Indian tennis balls, these were seal packed in pressurized containers and when you pulled the metal tab, there was a whoosh. For kids at school, there were geometry boxes by Staedtler, table tennis bats from Butterfly, Bic ballpoint pens and Parker 45 pens. Their parents used Cherry Blossom or Kiwi shoe polish to keep their shoes shined at all times. The polish scene still finds these two brands quite the strongest even today.