Feel old at times.
Just saw a toddler sipping on coke. Realized that I grew up having no idea what coke tasted like(this would be just after Janata Party and George Fernandes, hisfirst stint in power, and just before liberalization… with the original Mrs. G getting popped somewhere in the middle)
I’m not saying that knowing the taste of coke is an essential growing up experience, kinda addicted to colas and wish I wasn’t.

Will digress a bit here and tell you something about colas. Used to work in a government hospital, now a lot of patients in the ward used to be fed through feeding tubes. What happens after a while is that the tubes get blocked due to various interplays between food and stomach contents or just dried up bits of food. We’d usually replace the tube in such cases, but there were times when, it being a government hospital, tubes were out of stock.The patients’ relatives were usually asked to procure the tubes from pharmacies. A friend told me bout a neat trick that works. If you can’t replace the tube because you are out of stock and if the patient is “not affording”(a term in the quaint Marathi mixed English that doctors and nurses use to communicate in govt. hospitals in Mumbai, it means the poor chap can barely afford food let alone feeding tubes) take 10ml of Coke/Pepsi/Thumbs Up in a syringe and inject it into the clogged tubes and voila! It’s as good as new. The cola is acidic enough to clear the tube of food debris and other encrustation in a jiffy.
Strong stuff no?