If you happen to visit a wayside restaurant or rather, a tea shop in a small town in India at any time, you get accustomed to certain code words. Even as you sip your coffee or tea, three or four persons enter together, with one of them ordering, “Two by three” or “three by four”. “With or without?” pat comes the question from the tea maker. The customer and the owner speak only Indian languages, but the above said orders and queries are in English. These words have become a part and parcel of their language. “Two by three” means, they need two cups of coffee or tea poured into 3 cups. “With or without?” means weather the customer wants the tea or coffee with or without sugar! If a customer prefers “without” you can take it for granted that he is a diabetic patient.  Incidentally, it is “without” for most of the customers. But still, when prices of Sugar and a few other eatables began to skyrocket, there has been a hue and cry against food inflation and the opposition-sponsored strikes.

There has been a three-fold increase in the price of sugar in India and that is a clear indication that there has been a sharp fall in the production of sugar during this year; but it is just a passing phase.

Sugarcane cultivators would have taken the shortage of sugar as a blessing in disguise and would already have set apart more money and land for sugarcane cultivation in the hope that it will fetch them unprecedented profit. It is a lesson they have learnt from vegetable cultivators who switchover from cabbage to potato, depending on the demand.

So ladies and gentlemen, sugar will be cheaper the next year… Good luck!