India, Sept. 7 -- Come, September. Never has it been such a damp squib. Never in recent times has the month mapped out such melancholy and monsoon havoc. Come rain or shine, nonetheless nostalgia dutifully comes nudging with the stepping in of September. Come September, and a whole generation that grew up on that iconic Rock Hudson-Gina Lollobrigida starrer of the same title goes gallivanting down moviedom's memory lane. Twitterverse throbs into a tizzy with trivia and tales of this cult classic. Social media spins into a spate of sentimentality, revisiting the movie's signature soundtrack and scenes. Teenagehood was the time of bunking school or college classes to discover the delights of such Hollywood classics. Hollywood hunks, if truth be told. Teenagehood's troika ruling the hearts wielded no less power than today's Tianjin Troika -- Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, Rock Hudson. That was the age of video compact discs (VCDs). There were libraries for renting and borrowing VCDs. Nukkad kiryana shops too doubled up as VCD rentals. The lucre-lusting Lallaji would reel off VCD titles of Gable to Gregory classics through betel-stained battisi as nonchalantly as if he were peddling another carton of chai patti or banaspati. Not all households back then possessed VCDs to go with television sets that looked as stout as yesteryear's Tuntun, as contrasted to today's LED TVs as size zero as a Katrina Kaif or Kriti Sanon. Thus, it was that the classmates who did own a VCD player were coveted company. The VCD era even spawned a sort of barter economy among batchmates. A couple of Nancy Drews to The Famous Five, Malory Towers adventures to Mills & Boon in exchange for a VCD screening. The "M" factor --- Malory Towers or M&Bs --- governing this Batchmates' Big Fat Barter was determined by the state of teenagehood being navigated by negotiating parties. It was in these circumstances that there unfolded the brush with "Come September" and the crush on Hudson, in the bantering and blushing bylanes of teenagehood. What a pity Gen Z shall never know the wave of nostalgia that still floods collective cinephile memory, cutting across continents and classes, at the mere mention of this month. What a pity that the millennials' vocabulary may perhaps even stutter at spouting "Lollobrigida". For, they're more well-versed with celebrity Gomez than Gina, Lolo than Lollobrigida. Talking of flicks, September spells another sort of flood, too, for cine goers. Flood of meme fests. The new GST slabs by the finance minister (FM) on "sinful" consumption did not spare the popcorn packages so pivotal to munched movie-watching. The differential GST rates on cine goers' compulsive consumption -- salted to spicy to caramelised popcorn -- invited a meme fest that the FM found hard to swallow. Hence, a roll-back to uniform 'sin tax" of 5% on popcorn, regardless of caste, class and greed. So much for sauce politics. Talking of hunks, Bollywood biggies Ajay Devgn and Hrithik Roshan found themselves starring in this meme flood. Some netizens snarked that Devgn should now shift to endorsing popcorn rather than gutka, given the gross "sin tax" on tobacco. Maybe multiplexes should now contemplate screening these meme fests instead of commercials during the intermission. So as to serve cine goers more popcorn moments. Literally. The curious case of "Kabhi Kulfi, Kabhi Popcorn GST-Garam"....