Ice cream for all

Last weekend, on our routine visit to Sankey tank park, an incident made me coin this slogan “Ice cream for all’

Our weekend visits to the sankey tank park our near routine these days. Due to the vacations, the park looks like a crowded shopping area, where kids with their parents queue up in each of the play stations. If you are married and have kids this is ritual stuff. When we were done, we walked out of the park to get an ice cream (a good thing about the park they do not allow eatables inside), that is when this incident occurred.

The ice cream vendors are usually the kwality walls guys in their uniforms, selling ice creams, to the ever so consuming middle class. Me being in this group, got an ice cream and wife was feeding the ice cream to our daughter. Along with the ice cream vendors there are other vendors’ chaat guy, bhutta guy, ballon guys. The incident involves the ballon guys, the ballon vendors are kids I think barely above 10. Sales strategy adopted by them is also pretty interesting; they position the product only to the kids and never to the parents who holds the financial strings. Inevitably this strategy works, the parents buy the ballon end up carrying the ballon home, as the kid was just acting on impulse and has no further fondness towards the ballon.

So I was watching this one kid, who seemed a bit lethargic compared to the other kids selling the balloons. He had his eyes fixed on the ice cream vendor; his dilemma was I guess to I buy the ice cream or not. The positives would have been that he would for 5 minutes actually be a kid of his age and enjoy the coolness and the sweetness of the ice cream on a summer evening. Negatives would have been might be skipping a days food as perhaps the 5 bucks was his commission for the day, which would have fed him for a day. The dilemma was gripping the kid, he just would not take this eyes of the ice cream cart, the he made a bold move took 5 bucks from his pocket and asked for the vendor for stick ice. The vendor pushed him away, saying Hoogua (meaning go away in Kannada). Ice cream vendor did not want any customers moving away from his tall at the sight of a poster boy of poverty, standing there slurping away at an ice cream.

The boy backed of without any resistance; I had half a mind to buy the kid an ice cream, but a lot of things stopped me, one being with my act of philanthropy will the kid think that this is easier, I can just act sad an hungry and people would buy me things to eat and might be some money as well. The kid was actually trying to make a n honest living, with one act I did not want that to change. I am no expert at child psychology, so my action might not have caused the change at all, but I did not buy him the ice cream.

This is were nature as a leveler kicks in, the crowd eased it was nearing eight and the park was closing. The ice cream vendor calls the kid gives him an ice cream, and takes no money. Perhaps he understands the plight of being a ten year old hungry boy, envying the lives of the kids that passed him every day in and out of the park.

At that point all characters involved in this incident moved on, the ballon boy might to some pavement nook, the ice cream vendor to this thatched house in some slum and me to my apartment.

This is when, is it too much to ask there is an ice cream for every kid on a Sunday summer evening?