Saturday, December 05, 2009

The Orange Revolution.

When I was going to the Kindergarten there was only one drink that a kid loved. Fanta. In the children's gatherings, the adults would bring bottles of Fanta, as special treats.

First everybody seemed to love the grape flavor. When the pleasure time came, our small hands would invariably reach for the Fanta Grape bottles. There was actually a competition, in order to secure our own grape bottles, and not to be forced to accept the less desirable orange. It appeared as if the Reign of Grape would flourish for ever.

Then something extraordinary happened. One day somebody realized that the orange was not such a bad flavor. Maybe it was even better than the grape. A silent revolution was developing in front of our little eyes. Like a dramatic turn of events in a Reversi game, more and more kids would start preferring the orange flavor, until one day the little hands would reach only for the orange bottles. The grape bottles stood unattended. It was a sad sight.

To this day, I remember quite vividly how my world-view shook as the trend changed. Although it was a surely small shift in taste, I felt as if the ground on which my feet stood collapsed.

By the time I entered the elementary school, the Orange Revolution was complete. For some years, some of us small mortals did not forget how our sensitivities had been touched.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The term "Orange Revolution" had a special impact on me when it was first used several years back, only because of the use of the color orange in conjunction with the word "revolution" which is always a cause for excitement, thereby stimulating my interest in learning in detail about what was happening in Ukraine at the time. I am pleasantly surprised to see the same term humorously used here. Other colorful use of words which have sensuously lingered within me for some time include "Brown Bunny", "Blue Man", "Moulin Rouge", "Rayon Vert", "Black Widow", and the list goes on. As for revolutionary food experiences, I still remember my first bite of a MacDonald's hamburger, a home made pizza with rich tomato sauce at a friend's house, a sea urchin sushi, and the list also goes on. Unfortunately, all such experiences date back to at least twenty years ago and I have not had much meaningful food experiences since. I am getting thinner, and thinner...
SK