Just Walking Around

Desi Fizz….

Growing up as kids the best attraction during birthday parties was the cold glass of fizzy drinks like Goldspot or Thums Up. Till date we are habituated to drinking these carbonated drinks during dinners or at home for the fizz and most often than not to relieve us of the bloated feeling we get after a heavy meal.But sometimes you can try some offbeat drinks which not only give the end result but are great in taste too.

What do think when you hear the word ‘GOA”….Beach , Beer , Babes ..Fun ..Frolic but did you notices those small shack like shops dotting the beaches or the pathway toward the famous temples like Mangueshi or Shanta Durga Temple. On any given scorching day you will find some cold drink –beverage shop for the average teetooler like selling those cool cool drink made from the odd looking green bottles. If you keen observe these bottles they are deep biottle green with a contorted neck capped with a you guessed it right a marble or a Goti in local Konkani / Marathi language. Ask the fellow selling them to make you a drink and like an expert bartender , he will mix a little sugar solution from his earthen matka / steel drum ,with some jaljira masala , squeeze a juicy lemon into the galss and then finally top it up with the bubbly soda from the green bottle. The marble will be depressed using a mini wooden mallet and the soda flowing out with the gas holding the marble to the bottle mouth with a squeaking sound….chooooiiiii. This is expertly mixed in the glass and served with ice. Drink it to quench your thirst and feel releaved from the heat and humidity of Goa. This local fizzy drink is local to Konkan and some parts of Norther India where it is known as “Banta”

Banta also known as Fotash Jawl in Bengali, Goli Soda (Goli = spherical object in Hindi) or Goti Soda (Goti = marble in Hindi) is a colloquial term for a carbonated lemon or orange-flavoured soft drink popular in India. Though the origin of its name is from Punjabi word for marble (banta), Banta has been sold since the late 19th century,long before popular carbonated drinks arrived. The drink is often sold mixed with lemon juice, crushed ice, chaat masala and kala namak (black salt) as a carbonated variant of popular lemonades shikanjvi or jal-jeera.It is available at street-sellers known as bantawallahs.

And if you are in and around Vadodara you can always go to the local Soda Shop . You can identify the small shop which is always surrounded by a crowd of about 30 people.It consists of two soda dispensers and several employees. On the counter will be a wooden box sectioned into a few dozen compartments, each with a plastic cup of soda - sort of an assembly line, allowing the staff to handle many orders at once. Several plastic bottles sit on one end of the counter. fashioned into squeeze bottles, some will be filled with fresh lemon juice and plain or flavored syrups. There will be canisters with spices and rock salt. A couple of employees fill the cups with soda water and placed them in the compartments for a third employee — the flavor man — to finish with syrups and spices. You will be amazed at how quickly and gracefully they move, like dancers, effortlessly squeezing fresh lemon juice, squirting in syrups and mixing in condiments, handing the finished sodas to customers. I remember the first time I tried a nimbu soda. The first sip flooded my mouth with fresh lemon and spices that I'd never expected in a cup of soda: chili pepper, cumin, ginger, black salt. Sweet, salty, savory and a bit funky all at once. This was not just soda. This was masala soda, the single most flavorful sip of my entire trip, and I needed more.

The flavor I tried was the aerated cousin of nimbu pani, a sweet and salty lemonade or limeade that many Indians drink to stay hydrated during hot summers. But there's a myriad other flavors. The masala could contain as little as white salt, black salt and cumin, or an endless list of spices including amchoor (dried, powdered sour mango), black pepper, ginger, chili pepper (dried or fresh), turmeric, asafoetida, mint, even anar dana (dried pomegranate seed powder). A popular flavor in Mumbai and the state of Gujarat is jal jeera, a spice mix with roasted cumin that's otherwise used for another traditional summer drink of the same name — jal jeera literally translates to cumin water. The other most important ingredient of this masala is the kala namak, or blac black salt.

It's a rock salt containing sulfur, which lends a pungent, almost eggy smell to the drink. Carbonated water gives the drink effervescence, which can be further enhanced with a simple syrup and nimbu (meaning lemon or lime) juice or a fruit flavored drink called sherbet. Sometimes its even served with commercial sodas, like Thumbs Up (an Indian cola) or Sprite. But the best combination is when had with pure soda .A drink with a punch and bubbly but with out the side effect effects of an alchoholic drink…

When down south in Chennai, a mysterious drink with a hint of dark fruityness flourishes in refrigerators all over the Tamil Land. Its placebo effect in case of an upset stomach is legendary. Locals will tell you that it is the one thing you should drink after a kari dosa or other fiery eats from the Chennai’s streets. So when crates of Kalimark’s Bovonto are unloaded from the local old cycletrailer at small tea stalls , there is a happy clamour. “Bovonto is timeless,” says  owner of Zam Zam Tea Shop, receiving three crates of south India’s oldest homegrown soft drink. Forty-seven-year-old Mani, one of over two dozen Kalimark distributors in town, supplies to 60 shops every morning before popping open a bottle of grapey goodness for himself. I don’t think Bovonto

will ever go out of business. For a generation of Tamils, soft drink is “colour” and colour is the neon orange pop of Torino or the caramel tint of Bovonto. A true-blue Indian soda pop that refused to cede the battleground to multinational colas, Bovonto is a formulation of the century-old Kali Aerated Water Works. Worth over Rs 100 crore, it continues to expand its footprint in south India.

Every year, the cola wars pit blue against red, Pepsi against Coke, 7Up against Dew as the multinationals stake out their territories across India. But, like the last outpost of Gaul defiance against the Romans, homegrown sodas survive in many parts of India — their fabled histories reminders of older times, their quirky flavours a part of many memories. In 1977, as Coca-Cola was beating a retreat from India under the provisions of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, Torino, an orange soda with a prodigious use of sugar, entered the market in south India. In no time, they had captured 90 per cent of Karnataka’s orange soda market, says Pankaj Lakhani, the second-generation owner and MD of Bangalore Soft Drinks runs the business now. Torino has since been re-launched in PET

For homegrown soft drinks, trouble began to bubble over with the consolidation in the Indian carbonated beverage industry in 1993. Coca-Cola staged a comeback, acquiring Parle’s classic Indian sodas — Thums Up, Limca, Citra and Gold Spot — and small local brands began a slide to obsolescene. PepsiCo picked up Duke’s stable of masala sodas and Campa-Cola, a relic of socialist India, fizzled out.

A few unlikely survivors of the cola wars are now riding a wave of nostalgia and slaking the thirst of middle India. Torino, Bovonto, Sosyo and other sodas today cater largely to a niche outside the big cities that has tended to slip through the cracks of multinational brands. Even if they haven’t been as fortunate, other brands continue to be a part of the lore of the cities they sprung up in. Like Delhi’s banta. A lemon soda packed in quaint Codd botttles, and spiked with a kick of kala namak,

they are sold in carts across the city. Pandit Ved Prakash Lemon Wale, a shop in Chandni Chowk, has been selling the lemony drink for “at least 150 years” now. But local suppliers say the drink has lost its edge to bigger brands.

Of the triumvirate of raspberry sodas —Duke’s, Roger’s and Pallonji — of the Parsi community in Mumbai for over a century, only one remains. PV Solanki has been bottling Pallonji, a drink with a 149-year-old legacy, since 1979. He can not  take on big brands, and if they flexed their muscles, there is no way he would be able to survive. So Pallonji’s  decided to make their own market, as Solanki. Instead of servicing Mumbai, Pallonji is distributed within a 100-km radius of its only bottling plant in the suburb of Mankhurd. Within city limits, you can find it at Irani stores and select

petrol pumps if you are lucky. With a turnover of Rs 1.45 crore, Pallonji employs all of 40 people and Solanki says the business continues to be profitable

A trip to Surat in Gujarat is incomplete without a glug of Sosyo, a local pre- Independence-era soft drink that was an offshoot of the Swadeshi movement. Launched in 1923 by Hajoori & Sons in Zampabazaar, Sosyo’s theme was “Apna desh apna drink” and its USP an alcohol-like flavour. The manufacturers recently repackaged and re-launched the product to survive competition, but there was a time when Sosyo was the only drink Surtis ever needed. It combined the flavours of apple and grape to position itself as an alternative to wine in a dry state, an afterdinner digestive and a refreshing aerated beverage.

Indians love their masala sodas so much, that even global and regional companies are now bottling them. In 2012, Coca Cola relaunched a bottled masala cola called RimZim that they bought in 1994, and PepsiCo India released 7up Nimbooz Masala Soda.

But these commercial sodas lack customization and the atmosphere of a soda shop, which is a big part of the masala soda experience. As I learned in Vadodara, these Shops  are also social hubs, especially in dry states like Gujarat that lack bars. It's a meeting place where people gather to sip masala soda and talk with their friends.

I tasted one my favorite masala soda from one such street vendor in Mumbai. It was made from kokum (an Indian mangosteen), which is not available commercially. For 20 rupees , I sipped my sweet, sour and mildly savory soda as I watched small groups of friends come and go, drinking their sodas and chatting. The taste and memory have lingered on till date.

And to let you into a family secret . A standing joke in our extended family is that whenever we go out for a family dinner, the bill is never requested till my wifey Kashmira asks for a Fresh Lime Soda – sweet and salted. That is the sign that the family dinner has come to a close much like a closing ceremony of a super special event.  After a lot of leg  pulling  and laughing at her expense ,everyone on the dinner table has a sip of that cool drink .Finally with a large burp of satisfaction over the food we ate , there is a smile on our lips and fond memories of time well spent….

So Enjoy these Desi Fizzy drinks till they are still around fighting the large MNC’s . More power to these real foot soldiers of the Make In India campaign….