In our younger days, I remember collecting a whole lot of soft drink crown caps & exchanging them for prizes & gifts. In those days, if we exchanged crown caps we would win prizes like flickers, miniature bottles, cricket balls, autographed bats & a whole lot of other surprises. Of course, to win these, one had to drink soft drinks like Thums Up & Gold Spot - the equivalent of Fanta. Thums Up & Limca were quite popular otherwise also but to boost sales of Gold Spot, they came up with the Jungle Book offer, a book which was hugely popular then, just the same as it is now too. If we exchanged sufficient number of characters which were found in the crown caps, we would win a colourful copy of this book. Some of the characters were extremely rare so we had to drink quite a lot of soft drinks to eventually get our hands on this popular children's classic. We also traded the caps with our other friends to help one another. Now we know drinking too many soft drinks is not exactly healthy. These books are now easily available in the stores or one can order them online or even download from the internet. Or you could simply walk into the movie theatre and get the most amazing 3D experience watching Mowgli, Bageera, Raksha, Baloo & all the other characters come alive on the big screen. Today being World Book Day, this got me to recollect all that we did just to get a copy of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book, which was one of our favourites then. Nostalgic memories.
- warm regards, Sandeep Heble
