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THE REAL THING[An edited version of this story appeared in the winter 2011 issue of PORT magazine.]By Samanth SubramanianIn being a child of the 1990s and not being able to distinguish between Coke and Pepsi,I am an alarming aberration -- the equivalent of some hapless Ancien Régime courtierwho struggled to tell the taste of red wine from the taste of white. I'm up on my theory;I know that one is supposed to be sweeter than the other, but either I forget which iswhich, or I fail consistently to spot the difference in sugar levels. I read once that IndraNooyi, the chairman and chief executive officer of PepsiCo, can discern Coke from

Pepsi based on smell alone, and for this she has my undying respect. Somewhere,possibly, there is an even more skilled cola savant than Nooyi, who can identify a Cokeat twenty paces from its signature Pissshht! of a can being opened. I am at the veryopposite end of this spectrum.But I'm on much firmer ground with Thums Up, the great Indian cola with themisspelled name and the extravagant flavour curve. In India, as purchased from youraverage hole in the wall, Thums Up should deliver a precise sequence of sensations:first, a slight salty grubbiness around the mouth of the glass bottle, which has beencleaned and reused countless times and still feels never quite clean enough; next, asurge of fizz, rowdier than in Pepsi or Coke, so powerful that it will tickle the very tipsof your ears; then a faint intermezzo of saccharine before the final kick of what can onlybe called spice, a trumpeted announcement of its Indianness. Running through it all isan insistent bass line: memories of soft drink counters at weddings and pineapple cakeat birthday parties, of long, torrid summers and limited pocket money and post-schoolafternoons and Old Monk rum, for all of which Thums Up has been the only imaginableaccompaniment in India for 33 years now.Thums Up, India's best-selling soft drink, is an odd product. Had it not been for oneIndian government's decision to retreat from the world economy, Thums Up wouldnever have existed. From being the cola that almost wasn't, it became the cola thatflourished, then the cola that had a near-death experience, and finally the cola that wasresurrected. In following this life-cycle, Thums Up has changed as India has changed,hugging the curves of the country's progress so tightly that the two paths appearindistinguishable. As soft drinks go, Thums Up tastes fine. But there is, I suspect,something more to its popularity -- something more to how soundly it has wallopedCoke and Pepsi in the Indian market, to its presence in grocery stores in Queens andNew Jersey, or to its robust success in restaurants like London's Dishoom, styled as aclassic Irani cafe in Bombay. (In Bombay, mind, not Mumbai.) "Our numbers from lastyear say that we sold 150 bottles of Thums Up a week,” Shamil Thakrar, one ofDishoom's proprietors, told me, “and only about half that of Coke.”Thakrar, a former management consultant, grew up in Britain, and he started Dishoomlast year with two friends whose backgrounds were just as formally unconnected tocurry houses. "We recognised that these wonderful Irani cafes in Bombay were dyingout, which is very sad. Particularly in India, we're looking at modernity so much thatwe forget to look back at where we came from," he said. Thakrar visited India as a childfrequently in the 1970s and 1980s. "It felt like Cuba," he recalled. "Everything washomegrown, and it was all pretty miserable, but we view it through rose-tintedspectacles." Dishoom is designed to evoke that India. "When you're sitting in Dishoom,and you've had a chai, and you're taking in the artwork on the walls, and some old filmsong like Chura Liya comes on the music system, and then you order a Thums Up -- thenI've got you right where I want you. I'm taking you back to a time and a place." But

what time and place is that? What is this carbon-dioxide-addled nostalgia for India'sbleak socialist years that seems to be vacuum-sealed into every bottle of Thums Up?*Ramesh Chauhan, somebody once told me in a respectful tone, is a street-fighter. Hedoesn't dress for the role, certainly; the first time I met him, at the Cricket Club of Indiain Mumbai, he was wearing a baby pink T-shirt, and a little hand towel was tuckedneatly into the waist of his khakis. He has two great grandfatherly assets: snow-whitehair and a pudgy middle. He likes to wear a tartan flat cap, which always suggests thathe'd rather be golfing. He called me "yaar" -- "buddy" -- a lot. But Chauhan is feisty.Even his gait is quick and purposeful. When mosquitoes forced us to move from a tableby the tennis courts to a table in the bar, he led the way, taking short steps but takingthem so rapidly that his feet barely seemed to touch the ground. I struggled to keep up.Chauhan is the chairman of Parle Bisleri, which manufactures, among other things,Bisleri bottled water, named after a long-forgotten Italian entrepreneur and soubiquitous in India that it has become a synonym for all bottled water. ("That's notnecessarily a good thing," he told me. "If it becomes that generic, there're a danger thebrand will get lost.") Chauhan is the man who is seen as having sold the farm -- the manwho built Thums Up into one of India's biggest brands in the 1980s, only to allow it(and some other allied soft drink labels) to be bought out by Coca Cola for $50 millionin 1993. Even two decades later, this move puzzles thoughtful observers of the colalandscape. That same admirer of Chauhan's ability to fight on the street also told me:"That's why his decision to sell Thums Up seemed so uncharacteristic, so out ofcharacter."The Parle group began life in a little shack in Vile Parle, a Mumbai suburb that loanedpart of its name to the company. Chauhan's grandfather was a tailor, but five of his sons-- one of them Chauhan's father Jayantilal -- chose instead to start making boiled sweetsin 1929, and then biscuits in 1939. "It was a tough time," Chauhan said. "The Indianpopulation didn't really understand biscuits as it does today. The only people whowould eat biscuits were the British and the Parsis, and they liked their importedbiscuits." During World War II, though, ships carried fewer biscuits and more soldiersand guns, so Parle stepped gaily into the breach. "We were asked to make biscuits forthe military. And they'd post an army officer at the factory just to ensure that thesebiscuits were made."In 1949, a year before Coca Cola opened its first bottling plant in New Delhi, theChauhans started selling Gluco Cola. "At the time, they used to be called 'colachampagnes,' and we named it after our Gluco biscuits, because people knew thatbrand." As any cola named after a biscuit should, Gluco Cola expired rapidly. Threeyears later, though, Parle launched the much hardier Gold Spot, a virulent orange drink

I remember primarily for one of its print advertisements from the 1980s, featuring abunch of kids on a fire engine, all of them delighted by the untold joys that stationaryfire engines apparently provide. In another advertisement, a young boy shovelled coalinto the boiler of a locomotive, leering all the while at nothing in particular. Fun, wewere told in both cases, means Goldspotting.The soft drink business split Parle. "My father's other brothers didn't want to investanywhere outside Bombay, but you can't sell soft drinks that way," Chauhan said. "Youneed bottling plants everywhere. So my father broke away with the beverages unit in1961. But it was all amicable, entirely in house." The new company would be calledParle Bisleri, after the brand of water it acquired in 1967.For most of this time, Coca Cola was the best-selling soft drink the country, buoyed byits iconic appeal, the absence of Pepsi, and a lack of substantial competition. India drank32.5 million cases of soda in 1970 and 36.5 million in 1971, and people in the industry atthe time remember Coke's dominance so vividly that they don't bother with thesubtleties of market shares; in their memories, it was pretty much all Coke. By 1973,Coca Cola had 22 bottling plants in 13 states. As with all matters of overweeningpopularity in India, Coke even came up during debates in parliament. "What kind ofcountry is India, where you can get Coke in the cities but not clean drinking water inthe villages?" George Fernandes, a lanky, bespectacled unionist and among thestormiest of India's socialist petrels, once demanded to know. He also complained thatCoca Cola was doing far too well, making profits of Rs 10-15 million every year on aninvestment of just Rs 600,000. A character in the Shashi Tharoor novel Riot, an AmericanCoca Cola executive working in India, recalls over a whisky the darkling horizon: "Butit didn't faze us. We'd been through worse as a company in France in 1949-50, whenattempts to ban Coke nearly led to a trade war. We could handle our share of leftynationalist hysteria."In 1977, following a general election, Fernandes became the minister for industry.("Minister against industry might have been a better title for him," Tharoor's charactergrumbles.) The government in which Fernandes served set about implementing aforeign-exchange act that had been passed four years earlier but had only patchily beenimplemented. Under the act, foreign owners were allowed to hold just 40 per cent ofenterprises in India, which implied, potentially, that Coca Cola would have to share itssecret formula with an Indian partner. Coca Cola, as well as other American companieshurt by this rule, tried to brazen it out. One Coke executive would say: "If India wantsCoke, they'll have to have it on our terms." IBM informed Fernandes: "General deGaulle couldn't make us do it, and we won't for India either." Fernandes and hisgovernment accommodated no one. In the great corporate culling of 1977-78, 39companies, including Coca Cola, would exit India; they left behind only small squads ofaccountants, diligent morticians who attended to the last rites of this messy demise.

The expulsion of these companies, in the service of nationalism, was not only an act ofinsecurity but also a curious self-deception. Naively, it had assumed that foreigncompanies would fall meekly into line; arrogantly, it had assumed that India couldmanage perfectly without the companies that chose to leave. Even in its socialist garb,and through these wholly artificial means, it betrayed an earnest capitalist hunger: to beable to point to a modern, successful Indian-owned brand. Perhaps, in part, thisexplains the Indian fondness for Thums Up, the first brand to fulfill that hunger.Chauhan, who had started to head Parle Bisleri following the death of his father in 1971,recalls this governmental deus ex machina well. "There was this bureaucrat in thecommerce ministry, I remember -- his name was V. C. Pandey, and he was the onetasked with 'Indianising' all these companies. He knew all our balance sheets betterthan we knew them," he said. In 1977, the very year Coke departed from India, geysersof new colas erupted across the country, from the bottling facilities that had suddenlybecome available: Crown Cola, King Cola, Campa Cola. Even the government, whichhad until recently sneered at the cola segment and its bourgeois existence, started tomanufacture cola; in a stinging move, it was named 77, after the year in which Cokehad been bounced out of the joint. "I believe 77 was made by a bunch of scientists atgovernment's food technology research institute in Mysore," Chauhan said. "They madea perfectly balanced drink -- and it was perfectly nondescript." Bureaucracy had robbedeven cola of its charm.Santhosh Desai, a doyen of Indian brands and marketing, also remembers 77's "slightlyapologetic" taste "The launch of 77 launched was a huge event. It came first to Delhi,and it was launched in this big exhibition ground, as a part of some expo," he said. "Iwas 14. There was a queue, believe it or not, and so my brother and I stood in line todrink 77." This admission may have struck him as somewhat ridiculous, because hehastened to explain: "That was not a world of very many pleasures. So this was a bigdeal. In the context of middle-class scarcity, a bottle of cola was a small indulgence."Parle Bisleri arrived at this party fashionably late, in 1978. "The delay was because wewere agonising over the name, whether to call it Thums Up or not," Chauhan said. "Wewere hesitant, because the name seemed to signal a sort of 'Up yours' and I didn't wantit to become derogatory. I thought only westernised Indians, who were familiar withthe gesture, would recognise it as a positive thing. We struggled a lot with that. But ourad agency leaned heavily in favour of the name, so we went with it." Chauhan has noparticular explanation for the dropped "b" -- a spelling quirk that has variously beeninterpreted as a mistake, a trademark bid, and an Indianism. In Satyajit Ray's Agantuk, aworldly-wise, ever-didactic gentleman even points it out to his grand-nephew Satyakias some breed of obscure wit: A letter can be subtracted from a word, yet its import canremain the same. He chortles when Satyaki grasps this and shoots him back a grin and acocked thumb.

Parle Bisleri also tinkered longer with the drink's taste. Chauhan, with a sort of impishglee at the consternation he was about to cause in his interrogator, told me: "Come on,let's admit it. Honestly speaking, all these drinks -- Thums Up, Campa Cola, 77 -- tastepretty bad, right?" I demurred politely at this point, but he plugged away at his theme,like a pontiff speculating that the good book was perhaps not so good after all. "No, no,it's true. Cola is like beer, or like smoking. It's an acquired taste." Thums Up wascreated, he said, following a specific logic. "First it had to stand up to comparisons withPepsi or Coke, so we had to prove that we could do an equivalent. Then we added alittle twist. It's like a guy with just a little scar on his face, which makes you rememberthe face." What was the twist? I asked. "Oh, it was something," he mumbled. "I can't say.The Coke guys probably wouldn't like that very much."When Thums Up was finally launched, it was as a brawny, masculine cola -- a cola withbite. Chauhan insisted on advertising lavishly. Parle Bisleri spent Rs 2 million ontelevision commercials, a small fortune for the time; it hunted down star cricketers andpaid them to endorse Thums Up; once, it sponsored an entire West Indian cricket teamon its tour of India; it flooded the country with what Chauhan called "below the lineadvertising," hammering dinky Thums Up signboards over thousands of corner shopsand stalls and booths across India."And then," Chauhan said, "Thums Up really started to move."*One day in June, I drove down to Coca Cola's offices in Gurgaon, a Delhi suburb thathas grown swiftly, in the last decade, into a strange and chaotic little city. For a coupleof hours, I sat with Srinivas Murthy, the brand director for Thums Up, and workedthrough an archive of Thums Up commercials that he has stored on his laptop. Thephone on his desk cheeped constantly with murmured voices; he had been on aconference call when I entered his cabin, and although he could hit "Mute" on hisspeakerphone, he couldn't hang up because it would cut his colleagues off from talkingto each other.Santhosh Desai had, during a stint at an advertising agency, worked on the Coca Colaaccount, and when I met him, he had told me, with the air of a man minting anaphorism on the spot: "Coke is only in the business of selling Coke." In India, that putsCoca Cola in the profoundly unique situation of owning a domestic Coke-like brandthat does better than Coke. In India, as of May 2011, sales of Thums Up constituted 14.8per cent of the aerated beverages market. Sprite, another Coca Cola-owned brand, fell insecond place with 14 per cent, followed by Pepsi with 11.9 per cent. Coke could onlymanage fourth place.

Murthy, therefore, is in a piquant position at Coca Cola. His portfolio of brands includes-- in addition to Thums Up -- Fanta, Sprite and another former Parle Bisleri soda namedLimca. There's a different brand director handling Coke alone, yet it is Murthy's ThumsUp that is his company's best-selling soft drink. I mentioned this to Murthy. He smiledtactfully and suggested we watch some ads.In its essence, the Thums Up logo has never changed. It shows a red fist with anoutstretched thumb, the name contained within in bold white script. Coca Cola added ahost of blue-and-white lines to the left of the fist, the sort of lines that appear in SpeedyGonzales cartoons to show how fast he's running. "Taste the Thunder," Thums Up'smost timeworn slogan, has also persisted since 1987, although Coca Cola experimentedbriefly with "I want my Thunder." Chauhan mis-remembers this as "Give me myThunder," and he feels particularly aggrieved about the change. "Arrey yaar, why thechange? It's a soft drink, not nuclear science!"The official line about Thums Up is that it has always symbolised machismo. This line isstill trotted out by marketers, I can only assume, because the idea that Thums Up reallystood for -- an aspirational version of the Western world -- is now either politicallyincorrect or defunct. Even in its very existence, as a drink that tried to mimic andimprove upon the American cola, Thums Up symbolized that aspiration. Its first majortelevision commercial -- set to a hokey but charming jingle of celebration, "Happy Daysare here Again" -- ran to beaches and windsurfing and daring swimsuits and menwearing "University of New York" T-shirts. "Thums Up never explicitly proclaimed itwas Indian," Murthy said, and thus its ads in the 1980s always departed just so fromfamiliar Indian tropes. Here was a young man in the military, a drinker of Thums Up --except that he fought not in the army but in the air force, which had become newlyfashionable thanks to Top Gun. Here was another young man, sporty and fine, but heplayed rugby, not cricket or football. "Half the country must have gone: 'Arrey, that ballis the wrong shape! Why isn't he kicking it?' etc.," Murthy said. "So Thums Up doesn'tinspire an explicitly Indian kind of nostalgia."But it does, of course. For the television-watching generation of the 1980s, Thums Upwas the gateway drug, the product that led us to desire all the other consumables of theWestern world that were denied to us because of India's hermetically sealed economy.There was a sweet purity to these visions of the cola-swilling, rugby-playing world onthe other side of the globe, a purity that has now been tarnished by actual access to thatworld and its multifarious warts. Is that the nostalgia at work here, then: a nostalgia forthe innocence of a nation's collective childhood?Desai did not subscribe to this theory. "Nothing in India thrives on nostalgia. Paintingyesterday’s memory of scarcity with some romance, saying that yesterday’s hardshipwas about values and so forth -- I don't buy that," he said. "Nostalgia didn't help IndianAirlines of Bata shoes, for example. It may be all right in cinema, being retro, but

nobody in the real world would buy a Bajaj Chetak scooter for those reasons." Except,he concedes, the Indian diaspora, members of which have bought humpbacked, clunkyAmbassador cars in India and spirited them away to London. "There, it's an assertion ofidentity. It rescues you from the generic when you have India-marked possessions."According to data from Coca Cola, nearly 70 per cent of Thums Up drinkers are male --a skew that fits neatly with the soda's mien of advertising since the late 1980s, whenjolly beach bums began to be replaced by rugged men of adventurous spirit. (Theperpetually shirtless actor Salman Khan was an early brand ambassador.) Then, as now,these men are forever diving off cliffs or wrestling alligators or Parkouring their waythrough city blocks to get to their bottle of Thums Up. The tagline that attached itself tothe soda in 1987 -- "Taste the Thunder" -- was coined by Ashok Kurien, at an agencynamed Ambience Advertising, and it remains in place today.This appeal to the Indian male was, Kurien told me, a calculated one, and havingdeveloped it from scratch over a month in 1987, he went into the pitch meeting with justthis sole idea. The Thums Up executives at that meeting, one feels, were sitting ducks;Kurien can build even the act of drinking a soda into the stirring plot of aBildungsroman. "This was at a time when kids were given only orange drinks, and colawas considered to not be good for them, and to be only for adults," he said. "So weasked: What does this guy go through? Drinking his first cola is a rite of passage, likedrinking his first shot of rum or smoking his first cigarette. And in those days, youcould buy yourself that first cola only when you got your own pocket money, when youmade your first financial decisions." That is, Kurien insisted, what the average Indianmale customer at Dishoom was harking back to when he ordered a Thums Up: his firstthunderous taste of personal independence, and to the infinite possibilities of the youththat stretched before him.*The largest Coca Cola plant in south Asia is set on a 40-acre lot in Ghaziabad, anothertownship that has grown up just outside Delhi. It is a collection of squat factorybuildings, whose walls are painted with signs that proclaim a revised set of TenCommandments. "Problems make opportunities," one of them ran -- not really acommandment, I thought, and not even a watertight truth except perhaps in Coke'sworld of eternal sunshine. Most crucially, the buildings do not have Coke-red roofs,and in this I was sorely disappointed; I had imagined, as I approached the factory fromthe highway, that its roofs of red would burn in the distance, the horizon afire.I got Pankaj Srivastav, one of the plant's managers, into trouble mere hours aftermeeting him. In his office, he had genially sketched out his career for me: how hehailed from the family of the great Hindi writer Munshi Premchand, how he hadworked in Coca Cola plants across India and in Pepsi plans in the 1990s, and how he

would soon be moving to the company's corporate offices in Gurgaon. Then, at lunch inthe Coca Cola cafeteria with Srivastav and his colleagues, I made conversation byasking him: "So when do you move to corporate?"The table fell silent. Only one person in the rest of that group knew about the transfer, ittranspired, and he choked back a hasty giggle. The others stared at Srivastav and thenat me. Srivastav, looking aghast, mumbled, "Later, later," and forked more rice into hismouth.The Ghaziabad plant, Srivastav told me, was commissioned in 1998, and it couldproduce 32 million cases of various drinks in a year. Except for the bottles, the cans, andthe concentrate, everything else was made on site; third-party suppliers provided thecans, and the concentrate for all Coca Cola sodas was prepared, under thick mantles ofsecrecy, at a plant in Pune. Not surprisingly, Thums Up is his most popular product; theGhaziabad plant supplies all of Uttar Pradesh, a staunchly Thums Up state, with itssoda of choice, and that state's population is close to 200 million. "Sometimes we'll haveto institute an informal rationing system for Thums Up," he said. "A distributor willwant 200 cases, and since we can't give him all 200, we'll have to say: 'Look, take 50 ofThums Up and 150 cases of other drinks.'"Cola plants have an odd, funky smell, a malty whiff of old syrup and wet floors andheated air. This is, to be honest, one of the most interesting things about these plants.The bottling process itself is so regimented and automatic that a single glance can tellyou everything you need to know. The clean glass bottles come out here, arrayed intolong rows like little glass soldiers in formation; a belt takes them here, where they arefed Thums Up here, and then sealed here. In one bottling room, I followed the belt outthrough the far wall, where two men in shower caps and white coats sat on stools,scanning every single bottle for flaws and impurities. For minutes on end, theyscrutinised one bottle after another, each backlit by a fluorescent screen as if it were anx-ray; if they spotted a chip in the glass or a floating particle of something, they deftlysnatched that bottle away without shutting down the conveyor belt. Watching thesemen watching their bottles was hypnotizing, as extreme concentration is to those whocan only rarely achieve it.In the plant's research lab, I met V. S. Shakhambari, a physics graduate who had joinedParle Bisleri in 1989 and who had ridden the transition into Coca Cola. She rememberedRamesh Chauhan well. "He'd come into the plant and pass by a bottle washer, and justfrom the sounds he heard, he could tell if a certain part of the bottle washer was off orwasn't working as it should," she said. Chauhan's daughter Jayanti, she recalled, hadbeen diagnosed as diabetic when she was nine or ten years old. "So we'd make hersugar-free Thums Up by hand, mixing in artificial sweetener, and send her four or fivecrates a month."

By the time Chauhan announced that he was selling his stable of soft drinks to CocaCola in 1993, Shakhambari and her colleagues had already heard the rumours. "Wedidn't really know anything," she said. "Would only the formula go? Would men andmaterial go?" The transition, when it came, was smoother than they had expected.Shakhambari worked in a plant that Chauhan continued to own and run for two years,bottling Coca Cola products instead of his own. "So things still felt the same, except thatthe flavour changed to Coke. But for others who wanted to take voluntary retirement,there were some fights during the changeover. A number of the employees retired inthat period." Later into the 1990s, Shakhambari said, she noted that "they started toemphasize Coke big time. We weren't even allowed to take Thums Up's name, and itwas manufactured in very little quantities." Coke, meanwhile, was a sluggish captor ofmarket share. "At the time," she said, "I remember people around me in the factorywondering: 'There's no reason to fear Coke. Thums Up is such a good brand. So whywas it sold?'"*The process of liberalising India's economy, of hacking away at thickets of red tape andtoppling trade barriers and snatching away economic fiefdoms from public servants,began in 1991. A new prime minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, had taken charge of theshop just when its cupboards were Mother Hubbard-bare. India had just hocked 20tonnes of gold to borrow $200 million, and then another 47 tonnes for $405 million. (Inan interview, the economist Lord Meghnad Desai recalled being told that, during one ofthese shipments, the van carrying the gold broke down on its way to the airport."[T]here was total panic.") India's foreign exchange reserves had dwindled intonothingness, sufficient to pay for just three weeks of essential imports. Any assistancefrom the International Monetary Fund would be contingent on economic reforms, andso the then-finance minister -- and now prime minister -- Manmohan Singh dismantledthe rickety edifice of protectionism. In a landmark budget speech, he attempted to makeit all sound inevitable: "[A]s Victor Hugo once said: ‘No power on earth can stop anidea whose time has come.’ I suggest...that the emergence of India as a major economicpower in the world happens to be one such idea. Let the whole world hear it loud andclear. India is now wide awake."At the time, Thums Up -- not with its affiliated brands, but Thums Up alone -- made up60 per cent of the soda market in the country, beating even Pepsi, which had sidled intoIndia via a joint-venture in 1989. Admittedly, India has never been a nation of heavysoda drinkers. Today, Indians drink the equivalent of ten 200 ml bottles per person ayear, or less than one a month; in contrast, Pakistanis drink 80 bottles per person peryear, the Chinese drink 35, and Mexicans, who can only be going about their daily livesaffixed to IV lines of Coke and Pepsi, drink 700. But no marketer has ever gazed upon apotential market of several hundred million people and felt despondent, and so CocaCola came back to India in 1992.

In my conversation with Chauhan, we had arrived at an inflection point. Why did hesell?Chauhan shifted in his seat, and he adjusted and re-adjusted his hand towel until itneatly across his thigh. "You have to understand India at the time. We were under thetyranny of no imports, and the craze for foreign products was very high," he said. Hisbottlers and distributors -- men who came to meet him wearing heavy Swiss watches --grew apprehensive about the competition. "They knew Pepsi and Coke would fighthard, and they thought the craze for these drinks would kill us." Chauhan had anetwork of 60 bottlers and licensees, and he estimates now that at least 45 would havedeserted him to work with the multinationals instead. "In which case, the remaining 15or so who stuck with me would have gotten screwed anyway. So rather than break upthe network, I sold it in one intact piece, lock stock and barrel." In Calcutta, Kurienrecalled, Thums Up worked with two bottlers, both of whom made ominous noises inthe backs of their throat about defecting to Coke. "And in Calcutta we had a 90 per centmarket share! That's how bad it was."If Coca Cola India's new executives did not quite slay its prize heifer, Kurien claimed,they did push it into a deep coma; they barely produced the drink, and they advertisedit far less than Coke. Only after a decade, when Pepsi had grabbed between 60 and 70per cent of the market, was Thums Up shaken alive in the early 2000s. (Coca Cola sodasnow own a market share of between 50 and 60 per cent.) I heard this from other peoplein the industry too, and often from Chauhan, who had remarked, with genuine pathos,that selling Thums Up had felt "like sending your kid away to college." It made methink again of Desai's adage: "Coke is only in the business of selling Coke." The CocaCola executives I spoke to, however, denied that the company had attempted to burythe brand. "It was the first question I asked when I joined Coca Cola in 2001: Did thishappen?" Murthy said. "But certainly when I joined, Thums Up was as big a dealinternally as Coke. And I would find it illogical that you pay a lot of money for a brandand then not leverage it later."In a corporate history replete with ironies, this may perhaps be the most delicious: thatonly Thums Up could boost to No. 1 the company it had once replaced, the company towhich it had capitulated, and the company that had nearly done it in. The jingoistic willnote the contemporaneous parallels to other Indian companies -- Infosys Technologies;Tata Motors; Mittal Steel -- playing saviour to their erstwhile competitors abroad. Thejingoistic may also explain their championing of, and their fondness for, brands such asThums Up and Tata by way of pride in their worldbeating feats. But this line of thoughtis possibly inaccurate and certainly too crude, and it exhibits none of the spark of the O.Henry-esque story of Thums Up thus far: Coke, "the real thing," owes its success inIndia to a Coke knock-off, which in turn was only ever aspiring to be Coke.

*In a counter-factual version of history, Thums Up would not have been bought out;instead, it would have withered away into irrelevance, brushed as casually off themarket by Coke and Pepsi as a fly off the mouth of a cola bottle. It would have endedup, in other words, like Campa Cola, a brand that was started by Coke's bottlingpartner, Pure Drinks, in the late 1970s, and that seemed utterly satisfied with its No. 2position behind Thums Up throughout the 1980s. "It wasn't a bad cola," Chauhanconceded to me, in a moment of rumination. "But they did nothing with it. They hadalmost no advertising. I once saw an ad for it on TV, and it was just a dead still. Comeon yaar, it's an electronic medium. The damn thing should at least move."Campa Cola House, the company's old headquarters and bottling plant, sits in the veryheart of New Delhi, right next to the neo-Georgian colonnades of Connaught Place. Ithas been abandoned since 2000; Campa Cola is now manufactured in the town of Hisar,160 kilometres west of Delhi, and it is distributed, in desultory fashion, to a small clutchof shops scattered across north India. Like its owner, Campa Cola House is not quitedead yet; the vast, two-storied shell of the building, bleached into a pale salmon colour,is silent, but a security guard has been instructed to stand vigil outside the gate everyday. (That he is rarely to be found at his post is an altogether separate matter.) Three ofthe metalled alphabets in the large "Campa" sign -- ripped unabashedly off from thesinuous Coca Cola font -- have fallen away, leaving ghostly outlines on the wall behindthem. The final "a" is still firmly in place, however, and even though the "m" hasslipped, it looks as if it is hanging on for grim death.On the road, outside one corner of the building, a little kiosk sells cigarettes, bottles ofwater, and Campa Cola, "The Great Indian Taste." Campa Cola is too sickly sweet andviscous for me, not refreshing even on an afternoon in the middle of the bone-dry Delhisummer. Amit Sharma, the young man running the stall, leaned on his counter andwatched me drink up. "We do deliveries for parties," he told me. "Nine 500ml bottles forRs. 350. For Pepsi or Coke, that'd cost you Rs 510."I walked around the building, trying to peer through the gaps in its boarded-upwindows. In 2009, a New York Times reporter had run into an old accountant here, a 70-year-old man named Radha Krishan who sat in his office under the building's onlyremaining light bulb, trying to sort out tangles in retirement benefits for formeremployees. It was the kind of story, I thought, that would end with the reporter latermentioning this encounter to the company's CEO, only to be told with a horrified gasp:"There WAS a Radha Krishan working for us. But he died on the job 20 years ago!" Butthat didn't happen.On the two afternoons I visited Campa Cola House, nobody was home, althoughpassing the building on another occasion, I had once spotted a watchman snoozing

soundly in his chair, guarding nothing. The door to the lobby of the building was open,however, and some women had commandeered the three marble steps at the entranceto squat and sell fruit. I stood next to them and squinted inside and upwards, past thedefunct elevator, over the ascending spiral staircase, to the mezzanine floor. There wasno movement or noise; the building exhaled gusts of emptiness and despondency.Two auto-rickshaw drivers were sitting on the steps, their vehicles parked nearby. Theywatched me with a proprietorial air, and when I prepared to enter the lobby, they whatwhat'dvigorously. "What are you doing? You can't go in there," one of them said, withthe blustery officiousness that can only come from self-appointed authority.I scouted the building's periphery once more, spotting a small store room at the back,filled with empty cartons and crates. Then I returned to the lobby and strained againinto the gloom, and that was when I spotted it. On the wall near the elevator hung ablue clock with a plastic, gold-coloured frame, far, far less dusty than its surroundings.It was still running. For more than a decade, I realized, somebody had been cleaningthis clock and changing its batteries, so that it could count away the minutes and thehours in solitude, in a building that had already been left behind by time.***