Marble soda

After long time, I tasted one of my favorite drink ‘goli soda’ (marble soda), when I was near chengalpet – a town near to Chennai. It’s a common carbonate drink, enclosed in a bottle and sealed by a toy marble. There’re different types of sodas, known as color soda, paneer soda, ginger soda and lime soda. The color soda comes in three flavors such as cola, orange and green. In all these, I use to drink Paneer soda the most and I love the savor which tastes alike rose water. Since it was the only soda sold in our area then, next to the typical one.

There are times I wonder at marble sodas, that how came the marble inside the bottle and how it was sealed. Having seen many a days, how these bottles are arranged on the handcarts and pulled by man to deliver it to shops, I haven’t known how these marble sodas are sealed, until I checked this video.

One of an incident I could not forget was on the way through a village less than a decade ago, where I find color sodas on a store suddenly and indirect my dad who was driving! Thus he missed the speed breaker ahead and the car bumped huge and displaced everything inside the car and then stops the player to sing never again. From then, whenever we come across that village and sometime on huge speed breakers, this incident comes at instant.

Near to my grandpa’s home in Chennai, there was a marble soda company named Gugan & co. Whenever I visit my grandpa’s home and from their balcony, I used to watch the morning activates of this company being carried out the soda bottles in handcarts and rearranged it as per there delivery. The bottles would be arranged in wooden boxes, with a set of bottled keep upright and another set in inverse position to adjust the space, and every bottle seems alike, I used to think why the old man (who I usual see there arranging bottles) just keep on changing the bottles from one box to another.

The marble soda always attracts me and marbles being one my favorite things to play then, I use to think about hoe to get it out. Today we don’t see much marble sodas in stores esp. in cities like Chennai. Opening the bottle is another excitement and it can be open in two ways, by keeping our thumb or a specially designed block on the marble and strike with our palm to push the marble inside. In marble sodas, it’s always a trouble drinking it quite, as the marble that remains in the neck of the bottle used to block the mouth of the bottle while we tilt, so we need little cause to drink the soda.

After much occupation of international companies, the marble sodas face a hard time to survive and it exists only in rural sides and hardly suburbs today.