Playing it cool

Everybody knows what 420 means in the Indian context. But in American parlance it is something very different: four-twenty or 4/20 or April 20 denotes cannabis celebration; its cultural references are rooted in the hippie culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

- NAVTEJ SARNA

This year, on April 20, thousands gathered at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate for a collective “smoke-in” in a farcical throwback to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Only this time they were not celebrating the collapse of the Iron Curtain, but the part legalisation by Germany of cannabis (or marijuana, weed, pot, dope, grass…) for recreational use.