Heat signatures: How ads, power cuts and family time defined the Indian summer break

Skinned knees, climbing trees, the bite of hot gravel on bare feet — nostalgia is often tangled up with childhood, and childhood with memories of these deliciously empty weeks, because when else did one get such uninterrupted hours in which to simply be? To try a new sport and fail at it, pick a new hobby and let it drop. Go cycling in groups, a little further from home each year. Fight over cricket scores and broken windows. Complain about having nothing to do.

Some of these still define the summer break in India; some are simply gone. Take a look.

Sun spots

TV commercials often provided the first marker that the season was imminent. Mango drinks would start to rotate on screens. A menacing sun would pop out of a paper horizon, sucking the last bit of energy out of children with a straw.

There were the drinks (Rooh Afza, Tang, “I love you, Rasna”, but before that, “Livva little hot… sippa Gold Spot” featuring a teenaged Rekha in 1972); prickly-heat powders (“Uff, yeh khujli!”); floral soaps (Nima Rose!). Commercials for luggage (VIP’s “Kal bhi, aaj bhi” ads on Doordarshan were aimed at a train-travelling generation) and domestic tourism (“Kerala – God’s own country” was a tagline created in 1989).

And Shah Rukh Khan, in crisp linen, smiling about his “thanda thanda cool cool… pocket AC – Navratna cool talc”.

Then came liberalisation, and in a booming India, ad spots sold family packs of ice-cream, trips to water parks, air coolers (“Kelvinator – The Coolest One”).

As the pace of change sped up, the families in the ads looked different too. The nana-nani faded away, ceding more screen time to the nuclear family. “Washing powder Nirma” gave way to “Surf Excel Matic… for your new washing machine”.

The cola wars began. By 2001, Pepsi had signed Shah Rukh Khan (of that year’s Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham…); Coca-Cola, Hrithik Roshan (of that summer’s viral hit, Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai). Ahead of May and June, the hottest months of the year, Sassy Ads Enliven Soda War In India, a 2002 headline in The New York Times said.

It’s been a while since the sun with the straw appeared on behalf of the Glucon-D energy drink. Many urban families now face not too much but too little exposure to the sun, with Vitamin D deficiencies endemic in the cities. By 2018, Onida’s horned devil, used to boost TV sales since the 1980s, was using the idea of envy to encourage people to buy air-conditioners too.

Today, ads are customised on most screens. The sense of a shared experience, of families laughing together across a country, is minimised. Summer is synonymous with the Indian Premier League, and memorable campaigns emerge here, but they don’t seek to tell a story or capture a moment in time. That is already being done, over and over, in Reels and Tweets.

So the campaigns invent Zoozoos, use CGI for added sparkle. A story about an ageing teacher receiving the gift of Raymonds, on his last day at school, just wouldn’t do it anymore.

Time travel

The summer break was defined by time spent together, often with people one only reconnected with at this time of year — cousins, aunts and uncles, friends from other cities also back in the same home town.

Perhaps nothing brought these holidayers together more effectively than random (or scheduled) power cuts. When the lights went out, books and magazines turned into fans. Cots were carried out onto terraces or lawns. Games of Antakshari and charades were played by lamplight. The children ran off to play hide-and-seek, or listen to ghost stories made up or passed on by elders.

This was when family legends often re-emerged: the uncle who wasn’t really in the Navy, but was actually a bit of a ne’er-do-well last seen in a small mountain town; the grandmother who went missing for hours as a child, and was found chasing a runaway goat. Then stories of more gravity, told over and over, touching upon old wounds of early deaths, failed businesses, broken hearts, or home towns fled in a hurry.

A Mother Dairy ad captures the power-cut effect in a campaign tagged “Khushiyon ki parampara” (A tradition of happiness). A family in a metro city has a large refrigerator always full of ice-cream. When the power goes out each night, the family (mother, father, grandmother and two children) gather, smiling, to eat the cold, creamy treat before it melts.

One day there is no flicker and plunge into darkness. (In the prime cities, inverters and improved power generation mean that this is now happily the norm.) In the ad, the family looks around, uncertain how to continue. Then the mother sneaks away, flips a switch, and things return to the way they used to be. The father reaches for the ice-cream; the children begin to chatter. If only it were that simple.

Back to school

For many children, the end of summer and the return to school has, for decades, been marked by a somewhat tired tradition: The essay titled How I Spent My Summer Vacation. In the years before gaming and the internet, cafes and hyper-capitalism, it was sometimes hard to find enough to say; did the sprinkling of things one had done really warrant an essay?

Today, the average urban schoolgoer’s summer yields enough material for a multimedia presentation. There may be camping, photography, travel and Mandarin. Drama classes that also teach children to write their own play. Workshops that teach teens how to use dry ice in experiments. Urdu poetry recital; product design; mixed-media art; zine-making; digital storytelling.

Demand is high; prices higher. A typical two-week outdoor living course starts at ₹1.8 lakh for 14- to 18-year-olds. Lessons involve camping, cooking, basic first-aid and leadership development. For ages 9 to 12, rock-climbing and astronomy sessions begin at about ₹38,000 for six days. There are mountain-biking expeditions for teens in the Himalayas (prices start at ₹40,000); scuba diving, snorkelling and sea-kayaking in the coral reefs of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (starting at ₹69,000); white-water rafting in Rishikesh ( ₹55,000).

Elements of team work, time management and competition are often woven in. Many camps end with a mission: lead a team through a patch of forest by evening; create a machine-learning model by the end of the week. The back-to-school essays aren’t meant to be a competition, but in many schools, they now are.

Of course, it is not better by default, to do less. Exposure to new opportunities is a vital and precious resource. Each new skill attempted — whether tree-climbing or astronomy, dance or Mandarin — may spark a crucial affinity or revulsion. Over the years, these experiments can coalesce into a sense of who a child wants to be, and where they might find their place in the world.

But there is something to be said for the occasional bout of idleness. For the dutiful Indian child, the annual break has always been a rare time to explore who they are; ask the searching questions; try on a new identity.

The ambitious summer vacation, packed as it is with new skills and life lessons, is not an opportunity to break free and explore the world from new angles; it’s simply an extension of the school year. There is no time to be wasted, and that’s a pity.