Relatives, measures and relative measurements Of ice cruts, cycles and Bey Blades By Cecil Pinto
My eight year old son Desmond likes to quantify everything. "Dada how many more days for my birthday?" Which I can correctly answer, and from then on, with a little help from the inbuilt calculator in my cellphone, I can even inform Desmond how many hours and minutes away his birthday in February is, with a certain degree of exactitude. "Dada is a train faster than a cheetah?" This takes a lengthy explanation of long-term vs. short term speed, acceleration and brake-horse power. But all these queries on speed, magnitude and similar physical qualities are a breeze to answer when compared to Desmond's questions regarding money and monetary value. Let me hark back to when I was Desmond's age. Paper money was a difficult concept to understand and me, and most of my classmates, measured value in terms of 'ice cruts' and cycles. Let me explain? An ice fruit is basically what Americans call a popsicle and Europeans call an ice lolly, I think. Basically flavoured coloured liquid frozen around a stick. Ice fruits are purchased from ice fruit factories by ice fruit vendors who store them in tiffin like cylindrical insulated metal boxes. These boxes are then hung in bunches on cycle handle bars and the ice fruits are sold outside schools and at festive occasions. Nowadays the same thing is done using branded three wheeler cycle-carts and large rectangular storage containers, but the concept is the same. The ice fruit vendors would cycle large distances to arrive in time for the school interval. They would ring a small bell, not the standard cycle bell, to announce their presence/arrival. The vendors would also in a loud nasal tone announce their wares. For some reason they never ever said Ice Fruit but always some variant like Ice Crut! Ice Prate! and even Ice Krait! So now you know what an ice crut is. Sure you get them now but hygienically packed in a sealed branded colourful printed paper/plastic pouch and what not, so you cannot really call it an ice crut anymore. Now when I was in school an ice crut cost 25 paise. I'm forty one years old, what do you expect? For one rupee you could purchase what was called a milk candy. Basically a white vanilla ice cream like substance on a stick. I don't know much about milk candy because 1) Only the richer boys could afford it regularly 2) It tasted more like Plaster of Paris mixed with whitewash 3) Maybe I like to think it tasted that way because I could not afford it and so didn't want anyone else enjoying it either. In Aldona the ice crut vendors were Guru and Goddo who used to cycle the eight kilometers from the Mapusa ice cream factory everyday. In the monsoons when ice crut were not in demand Guru used to sell two sizes of samosas, whereas Goddo used to repair umbrellas near the Mapusa lottery vendors. A young non-Goan boy nick named Girmit was also selling ice cruts for a while but then changed careers and became a pilot. "Dada!" Ok! Ok! An ice crut therefore became a measure of value. For example Rs. 5/- was just a vague concept but when we thought of it as worth 20 ice cruts then we placed a value on it. As we progressed from primary to secondary school inflation, and desire, caught up and we proceeded to discuss and conceptualize bigger amounts. Ice cruts lost value rapidly and became redundant as a currency, like the Zimbabwean dollar. The next denomination of value was a cycle. Back then, as with ice cruts, there wasn't much choice in cycles. You had the standard straightforward gents cycle (Atlas/Hercules) and the flimsy ones with the curved handles and cable brakes (BSA) for girls and richer boys. Prices were in the Rs. 400/- to Rs. 500/- range. Give or take a few ice cruts. So when we admired Joaquim Alvares' father's gleaming new Fiat car we thought he must indeed be a very rich man to have paid the equivalent of 200 cycles for it. Between cycles and ice cruts anything could be put in its correct monetary place. "Dada, I thought you were writing about me?!" Ok! Ok! Maybe I'm just trying to avoid getting to the point because of the obscenely large money figures Desmond has to deal with. Two years back when watching Kaun Banega Crorepati he was suitably impressed by the enormousness of a crore. Also because a million, which he hears regularly on Cartoon Network, was so much smaller. That it takes ten million to make one crore makes our very patriotic Desmond feel proud of his country. But despite that last week when he heard that Sujay's friend has paid one crore for a three bedroom apartment in Dona Paula it was quite depressing. Desmond always felt a crore could easily buy a house as big as a football field, if not bigger. In addition to this recently Desmond has learnt about currencies and figured that a million dollars is actually worth four times more than a crore rupees. That certainly has got our patriotic Desmond very depressed. But in a way I am glad he understands about the value of money, differences in currency and inflation at a young age. When he crosses the age of twenty one I will throw him out of my apartment. He should know that even ten million BeyBlades, at today's prices, will not get him even a single bedroom apartment at Valpoi by then. "Dada, where was Solomon's temple?" Well Desmond there are varying accounts of its exact location. You must understand that this was hundreds of years before Jesus Christ, and historical records of that time were not so…"No Dada, you didn't understand. Solomon's temple was at the side of his head!" Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrgggghhhhh!!! -------------------- The column above appeared in Gomantak Times dated 11th September 2008 ==========