Holistic skin care

Yesterday, at an intersection in Kodambakkam, a scooter waited alongside me for the signal to turn green. On it were a man and two boys - his sons, I presumed, returning from cricket coaching. One of the boys must have been in the under-12 group at his academy, and the other, squashed between his brother and father, in the under-10s.
What caught my eye were their feet, shod in dusty white with three red stripes on each side. It's a sight I see quite often while riding to or back from work.
In the days I attended cricket coaching, Adidas shoes weren't entirely absent, but they weren't ubiquitous, certainly not among the under-10s and 12s. A lot of them carried expensive bats in their kitbags, but maybe the need for pitch-cred didn't extend to the shoes you wore.
In any case, back then, we had Ponds.
Yes, the Ponds of sunscreens, talcum powders, anti-ageing creams and aloe-vera body lotions in those days manufactured cricket shoes with prolifically, protuberantly pimpled soles and uncomfortably stiff uppers. Or possibly another company with the same name, but in any case the shoes were a common sight on cricket fields in Chennai back then. And back then wasn't too long ago - my first (and last) pair of Ponds shoes was purchased as recently as the academic year 2000-01, when I was a ninth standard kid.
I wonder what happened to Ponds, the shoemakers.