“It’s Alive” – The Hot Spot is born – Islamabad ’95

As 1995 rolled around, I found myself at a crossroads with confusion and conflict being unwanted constant companions.  Teaching and especially coaching sport had been an incredible experience.  An experience I have never regretted, even though the monetary returns were anaemic and unsustainable.
As I started opening the same textbook book I had been returning to for several years, I found my enthusiasm levels were not where I expected.  It disturbed me considerably thinking of all the bright-eyed lads before me deserving nothing less than 100%.  For the first time in seven years, being in the classroom with the same text repeatedly and going through the same routine was beginning to take a toll.  I never wanted to be a teacher who goes through the motions.  It was a tough decision, a wrench from a job I had invested my heart in for so long.
While I was teaching, the students and the sports were everything.  Now it was time to try to move on and reach some decisions.  Academia had a few job offers at some of the country’s most prestigious institutions, some in journalism and even as a full-time coach working with professional First Class Cricketers.  Dr A.Q.Khan generously extended an offer to coach even if my stint with the Islamabad Under 19 team had been blighted by political interference.
The incredible cricket team I helped shape at school earned quite a reputation, and some of the younger cricketers emerging were among the finest talent in the nation.  Perhaps word was getting around.  We recently played a match against a team containing Azhar Mahmood, who scored a very solid 100 against our lads.  However, we put up a solid fight, having lost our star batsman on the first ball of the match—a lad who was playing at Lords for Pakistan just a few years later.  Just months after hitting our team for a solid hundred, Azhar was carving up the South African national team for three successive hundreds!

Initially, I had to take a break from teaching and allow myself some time to clear up the confusion that was swirling around in my head.  My younger brother Ali and his wife Mariam joined me in Islamabad for a stretch as he threw himself into his research on Child Employment.  The presence of these two was exactly the tonic I needed at this stage, and we started talking about the idea of recreating the things that we have had a mad passion for in life.  A massive litter of tiny German Shepherds scampering about kept me from fretting about being in the “unemployed category”.
Encouraged by an ever-supportive family, a vague idea became more focused and without even realising it, we were on the road to stumbling into a new enterprise with 200% passion and enthusiasm and 00% experience.  In educating ourselves by licking up all the ice cream-related literature we found, we were encouraged to find that most of the experts in the field mentioned that the old-fashioned “wooden bucket” style still produced the finest quality ice cream.  Since we had no money to invest in high-tech machinery, we were happy to try our hand at actually hand-cranking our ice cream physically, with each of us taking turns until exhaustion.

There was a long “Must work” list for this operation to get off square one.  Expectations were realistic rather than exceptionally high.  From the rock salt to the speed of blade revolutions to the quality of the available cream and the hardening process, considering we were not going to be using any of the weird gum or emulsifiers that industrial manufacturers use to keep the texture of their ice cream right for storage over long periods.

Myself, Ali and Mariam, each churning away till squealing in from muscle fatigue.  Memorable moments of bonding, head-scratching, innovation, problem-solving, sweating & toiling until we were finally ready to check on the fruits of our labour.  It’s been a meticulous and honest effort with no compromise.  Will our guiding lights lead us to anything of promise?  The moment of truth was upon us.

With the hand churning becoming more brutal and demanding, it was time to check on the final product.  Is this project over before it starts, or is there some wisdom and truth in these dusty books?

Now, a brief reminder about where the world was when we embarked on this unknown journey to who knows where.
Islamabad was always known as the nation’s backwater capital, where the pace of life followed its inhabitants, slow and surreal.
There were critical economic, financial and strategic issues in the wake of an increasingly polarising Islamic world where Osama Bin Laden demanded print space in the World’s Newspapers.  The Tories were wrested from power in Britain amidst massive jubilation and hope.  George Bush was waiting in the wings just across the pond.  There was hope in the air.  The post-Soviet World order was still in flux, with the former Yugoslavian states drawn into vicious disputes.  The War in Sri Lanka raged on.  Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a stable, prosperous, massively corrupt regime ruled by savagery.  Other than politics, the world was starting on an incredible new journey that would radically affect our lives; the internet.  These were the early days of Netscape and Yahoo and waiting an eternity for pages to open, and yet, it was clear that the world was in the midst of a revolution unlike any witnessed in our lifetimes.  Just before that, Satellite TV had started shrinking the world.  Billions were exposed to a world on their TVs that they never knew existed.  MTV reached homes in the Himalayas before it became Channel V. Nearly 30 years on, the internet comes shortly after air, food and water as a fundamental human requirement.  The CD was the primary supply line of music, and the DVD did not exist.  The first cell phones were arriving and were huge and bulky and only afforded by people with bloated accounts, egos, or both.  Islamabad had no cinemas at all.  Everyone relied on the million shops renting pirated VHS tapes of Western and Bollywood movies.  LaserDiscs were the in thing for the hip set but were just about to become dinosaurs themselves with DVD just around the corner.

The Food scene in Islamabad was barren, with Usmania, Sufi, Jehangir and the volatile Umar Khayyam as the capitals Mainstay along with Golden Dragon, hidden away in the leafy suburbs, one of the city’s oldest restaurants.  The Desi-Chinese hybrid and its kind ruling the roost and fangled colonial dishes and buffets formed the menus found in 80% of the restaurants around.  Papa Sallis started featuring an Italian menu with slightly more attention to creating some ambience, causing a stampede in Islamabad as customers thronged from far and wide.

In the early to mid-90s, Papa Sallis was the place to see and be seen on the restaurant scene.  The food was a welcome step away from the formula menu for most desi outlets, and it upped the game for the next wave of restaurants to emulate.  No International Franchises (McRonalds and Pizza Hot, anyone?) were in the mix, though Britain’s intrepid Wimpy had arrived in Karachi.  Still, local outlets started to emerge, offering a different fare to what we had become accustomed to and somewhat jaded by over the years.  Many came and went, and some managed to make a name for themselves and thrive.  When McDonald’s opened in Lahore, people would travel to the city for hours to grab a bite and return with stale fries and cold burgers for their Islamabadi friends!  People even set up stalls in Islamabad and sold re-heated burgers lugged from the Lahore McDonalds.

The ice cream and desserts scene was similarly dated, emphasising colonial relics, delicious though they are.  Caramel Custard dominated the day and is sublime enough to earn that honour but other than some pretty busy but nasty trifle kind of items; there wasn’t much.  Cakes, at that point, were all about how they looked rather than tasted, which was a little like cardboard and sugar.  Soft Scoop ice cream was the staple popular with the public.  It was cheap, sweet, and cold, yet by today’s standards, it would not qualify as a Dairy product because it was made mainly of sugar-based syrup with little or no dairy contained.

There were local ice cream parlours that had loyal customers.  Yummy 36 was a modern-style ice cream parlour with numerous flavours and popularity nationwide.  In Islamabad, we had a large outlet named Sogo 2000, an ice cream parlour offering a large selection.  We made trips to these parlours to check on their ice cream and assess them.  We found that the ice cream was sweet, cold, and colourful, but it was difficult to tell one flavour from the other because they were so bland and generic that they had just one overwhelming characteristic: sweetness.  The strawberry was vivid pink but didn’t taste like any strawberry I had ever encountered.  The chocolate was a lightish brown sweet, and you could probably guess that it was some very mild form of chocolate.  The vanilla was milky and bland to our tastebuds.
We returned from our research trips with the idea that though the ice cream served in the established parlours offered some splendid ice cream, we felt it lacked character and commitment to its flavours, and we thought we could provide a product that could find a niche.  The apparent bright colouring of many flavours was instantly offputting, with everything looking unnatural.  We had already decided to avoid using anything excessive and simply decorative, as in food colouring.  We were also not going to attempt to douse blandness and sweetness with an array of fluorescent sauces and toppings.  Our target would be the ice cream connoisseur who would be put off by excess and be entirely interested in the mouthfeel, texture, creaminess, subtle flavours and aftertaste of our ice cream.  Call us “Old Fashioned”. Call us boring if you like.  We prefer to see ourselves as unashamed ice cream-loving purists with a slightly adventurous streak and a desire to continue to learn, experiment, evolve and connect with the community of ice cream lovers out there, young of old, casual or connoisseur. 

I know that I judge an ice cream based on what my sensations signalled to my brain, and though looks mean a lot, they aren’t enough on their own.  The selfie and Instagram age have produced something as offensive as the” Instagrammable” food item made to be photographed rather than eaten.  Perhaps the future holds Michelin-like stars for food that looks good.  People buy with their eyes, so obviously, the product should be attractive – that makes perfect sense.  However, eating for Instagram and Tik Tok will soon be classified as a social media-fuelled mental disorder; you can be sure of that.

Back to the stormy August evenings experimenting with ingredients, books, techniques, speeds, salt and the bucket.  One ominous night as the wind howled and the lightning crackled above, there was a rumble of thunder and some more flashes as we looked at one another gingerly before prising off the lid of our metal ice cream cylinder.  Now, it was do or die.

After purring with delight over the ice cream, we were incredulous that we had matched some of our best memories with ice cream made with our bare hands and churned with each of us taking turns.  The Master Business Plan took precisely two minutes to execute as none of us had the slightest orientation to business, and that was pretty much that.  The Plan was to scratch out the few flavours we prepared on a blackboard outside, hang it on a tree opposite the school, and hope that someone would be bold enough to venture forward.  No advertising, publicity, permission, documentation, licensing, certificates, or paperwork – absolutely NO PLAN!  The idea was to see how it went.

From the old Hot Spot website:
Other than being a steamy 90’s film noir starring “Big Don” Johnson that most people have long forgotten, The Hot Spot is outwardly just an ice cream shop nestled away in a quiet corner of the otherwise teeming metropolis Islamabad.  However, upon closer inspection, there are far darker and more sinister happenings than merely ice cream at The Hot Spot.

Essentially though, we started as an enormous mess in the kitchen.  Two maniacal brothers and one persistent aid – we grappled long and hard with our wooden buckets till the wee hours of the morning, producing dollops of yucky-looking and equally yucky-tasting mush.  One muggy summer night, when the terrible twins were scraping the depths of despair in a last-gasp attempt at salvation – agreeing to go for broke.  The Brothers Grimm launched Plan 9 for one last shot at creation.  Then, lightning struck!

We had somehow produced a concoction that we, avid lifetime devourers of ice cream, deemed to be as good as we had experienced anywhere.  Elated at what we thought was the magic elixir of life, we began churning out more, and fortunately, it didn’t taste half bad either.  Could it be that this was a signal from the gods?!  We had our doubts.

For the next crucial experiment, we needed a healthy supply of guinea pigs, and luckily they happened to be waiting like sitting ducks in the form of the young and unsuspecting students from the school across the road.

One fine, suitably hot and humid August day, we dragged out a rickety old blackboard with a couple of flavours scratched onto it.  This board was then strung up from the tree that overlooked the road outside, thus our introduction to the world of “business”.
We were all set for our “Grand Opening”, with some local crows wondering what the blackboard hanging from their tree was about.  The murder of crows doubled as our chief guests.  There was no ribbon cutting, speeches, drama, pomp or ceremony.  Not even a puny balloon – we were already way over budget, and I had zero savings, having been a teacher the last seven years of my life.  We had no investors nor silent partners; what you see is what you get!  Either our product spoke for itself, or else we were done for.  It was as simple as that.

There was a gnawing sense of anticipation as the first day of a new school year began across the street on August 16th 1995—days of Boyz To Men, Mariah Carey, Hootie & The Blowfish, TLC, Oasis, Blur and the Rise and Rise of Britpop.  Batman Forever had just bombed, Clueless was the season’s sleeper, and Se7en was the next big thing.  The Pakistani Rupee was 10 to the US dollar, and hope was in the air as the shadow of Dictatorship appeared to recede ever so slightly.

The first scoop of ice cream sold was a triumph, shock, and trauma all rolled into one.
One or two of the more rebellious kind of kids with a particularly devil-may-care (some might even say death-wish-like) attitude was the first to step up to the window to sample the mysterious wares.  Soon, the little monsters did what they do best and dragged along their brothers and sisters, as well as Mom and Dad, to that notorious “Last House On The Right” in F 6/3’s Street 60.  There were initial whispers and mutterings here and there, but gradually, a trickle of brave customers became most of the small school.

Word of mouth in the sleepy town began to kick in, and by the time the weekend rolled around, there were enough cars to keep us from falling asleep watching TV.  Muttley, Maxi and tiny little Felix wondered why the sudden visitor count was rising.

Soon we discovered we needed more freezers and ice cream buckets not to run out daily!  “We’re Going To Need a Bigger Boat!” Perhaps not a boat, but we would need a bigger blackboard to write our growing “array” of flavours.

All those nights churning away till the mad hours of dawn now appeared well worth the pain, so the story began.  The ugly, nonsensical dabblings followed soon after.  To our knowledge, frozen Yogurt hadn’t existed anywhere at that stage in Pakistan.  It was several years before the arrival of the franchises, so we were chuffed to be the first enterprise that we knew of (we could be wrong) to introduce Frozen Yogurt to the local scene.  It was encouraging that people were so open to new ideas and change.

Our interest in films started from infancy due to our batty parents who, like it or not, have to brunt most of the blame for the solid streak of madness that runs through the siblings they spawned.  The fever is hereditary.  A warped childhood full of twisted experiences, such as burning down the house and delinquency bordering on the John Waters level, led to an unhealthy interest in Horror and Cult, Trash and Z-grade cinema.

As if this wasn’t enough of an assault on the poor unsuspecting citizens of the city, we now decided to launch another version of Plan 9 in the form of our own subversive, underground magazine, which was to be known as “The Scream” – and before you all groan “how original!” let it be known that our Scream preceded that of Wes Craven’s by a good year or so!

The first issue of The Scream was published in the autumn of 1995 and thus the genesis of The Hot Spot’s official rag.  Only 100 copies were issued, and those mortals who have kept their’s stand to make a fortune someday soon, as shortly they will be declared as enormously valuable collector’s items!

Massive critical plaudits followed by the cartload, and as all copies sold out in days, The Scream Team decided to make the publication a regular feature.  Each subsequent issue grew exponentially in size as well as in inflammatory and subversive material and found its market judging by how quickly the magazines sold out.
Finally, after our last issue ended up clocking in at over 50 pages, it was decided that the show ought to move online – no more scissors, glue and sticky bits of paper littering the house – now we would publish our Screamer of an Underground rag directly on the Web, thus spreading the gospel far and wide like a plague.  There can be no escape now.  Welcome to the world of ice cream, movies and much more!!!

The Hot Spot’s Story, trials, tribulations, salacious gossip, foray into cinema, agony aunt, rants, and dodgy theories can all be followed on our Official Independent Blog at WWW.KILLERRAT.COMCall us