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The passage given below is followed by a set of five questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.
When I was little, children were bought two kinds of ice cream, sold from those while wagons with canopies made of silvery metal; either the two-cent cone or the four-cent ice cream pie. The two-cent cone was very small, in fact it could fit comfortably into a child's hand, and it was made by taking the ice cream from its container with a special scoop and piling it on the cone. Granny always suggested I eat only a part of the cone, then throw away the pointed end, because it had been touched by the vendor's hand (though that was the best part, nice and crunchy, and it was regularly eaten in secret, after a pretence of discarding it).
The four-cent pie was made by a special little machine, also silvery, pressed two discs of sweet biscuit against a cylindrical section of ice cream. First, you had to thrust your tongue into the gap between the biscuits until it touched the central nucleus if ice cream; then, gradually, you ate the whole thing, the biscuit surfaces softening as they become soaked in creamy nectar. Granny had no advice to give here: in theory the pies had been touched only by the machine; in practice, the vendor had held them in his hand while giving them to us, but it was impossible to isolate the contaminated area.
I was fascinated, however, by some of my peers, whose parents bought them not a four-cent pie but two two-cent cones. These privileged children advanced proudly with one cone in their right hand and one in their left; and expertly moving their hand from side to side, they licked first one, then the other. This liturgy seemed to me so sumptuously enviable, that many times I asked to be allowed to celebrate it. In vain. My elders were inflexible: a four-cent ice, yes; but two two-cent ones, absolutely no.
As anyone can see, neither mathematics nor economics nor dietetics justified this refusal. Nor did hygiene, assuming that in due course the tips of both cones were discarded. The pathetic, and obviously mendacious, justification was that a boy concerned with turning his eyes from one cone to the other was more inclined to stumble over stones, steps, or cracks in the pavement. I dimly sensed that there was another secret justification, cruelly pedagogical, but I was unable to grasp it.
Today, citizen and victim of a consumer society, a civilisation of excess and waste (which the society of the thirties was not), I realise that those dear and now departed elders were right. Two two-cent cone instead of one at four cents did not signify squandering, economically speaking, but symbolically they surely did. It was for this precise reason that I yearned for them: because two ice creams suggested excess. And this was precisely why they were denied to me; because they looked indecent, an insult to poverty, a display of fictitious privilege, a boast of wealth.Only spoiled children ate two cones at once, those children who in fairy tales were rightly punished, as Pinocchio was when he rejected the skin and the stalk. And parents who encouraged this weakness, appropriate to little parvenus, were bringing up their children in the foolish theatre of " I'd like to but I can't ". They were preparing them to turn up at tourist-class check-in with a fake Gucci bag bought from a street peddler on the beach at Rimini.
Nowadays the moralist risks seeming at odds with morality, in a world where the consumer civilisation now wants even adults to be spoiled, and promise them always something more, from the wristwatch in the box of detergent to the bonus bangle sheathed, with the magazine it accompanies, in a plastic envelope. Like the parents of those ambidextrous gluttons I so envied, the consumer civilisation pretends to give more , but actually gives, for four cents, what is worth four cents. You will throw away the old transistor radio to purchase the new one, that boasts an alarm clock as guarantee that the radio lasts only a year. The new jeep will have leather seats, double side mirrors adjustable from inside, and a glorious old Fiat 500, which, even when it broke down, could be started again with a kick.
The morality of the old days made Spartans of us all, while today's morality wants all of us to be Sybarites.

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SIMILAR QUESTIONS

A. I did not know what to make of you.
B. Because you'd lived in India, I associate you more with my parents than with me.
C. And yet you were unlike my cousins in Calcutta, who seem so innocent and obedient when I visited them.
D. You were not curious about me in the least.
E. Although you did make effort to meet me.
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Given the cultural and intellectual interconnections, the question of what is 'Western' and what is 'Eastern' (or Indian) is often hard to decide, and the issue can be discussed only in more dialectical terms. The diagnosis of a through as 'Purely Western' or Purely Indian' can be very illusory.
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The author pined for two two-cent cones instead of one four-cent pie because
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