People say India doesn’t progress because Indians don’t break out of their Third World mentality.
This is true. Chocolates are the best example.
In the First World, chocolates are huge. Chocolate bars are about three inches wide, and a foot long. Europeans take chocolate seriously. So do Australians. Americans don’t. Their chocolates are big, but the quality of cocoa is terrible.
Indians don’t take chocolate seriously at all.
The Third World mentality ensures that chocolate is regarded as a luxury item. So, to get people to buy it, it is sold in tiny packs of five rupees. The latest invention is the liquid chocolate stick- a travesty that retails for one rupees and gives you less than a single mouthful of chocolate.
When Cadbury’s launched Temptations almost two years ago, I was delighted. It was advertised as being of international quality. I found it to be so, too. The chocolate was richer and more flavourful than usual. The flavours and embedded fruits and nuts were delicious.
As always, the bar itself was too small.
When you buy a Temptations, you see the package and say- ‘What Ho! An international quality chocolate of international size!’.
When you open it, you are disillusioned. The apparent width is made up by cardboard. The chocolate itself is two bars thick- no more than a standard Dairy Milk. It was very disappointing.
Hope, however, has recently floated in the form of the Cadbury’s Chunky variants- they’re not very long, but they’re thick. A lot of bang for your buck. And, wonders, the cocoa content seems to have improved even in the standard chocolates. Standard chocolates are evolving.
Could this be a sign of progress? Does this mean that India is finally shedding off it’s baggage and moving into the future? Or is my metric of development hopelessly inaccurate?
[…] my earlier Fillet about chocolate, I had mentioned in passing that while American chocolate is big, it isn’t good. Sure, […]