Coloring books, dolls, chopu, monopoly, carom, lock and key, four corners, Enid Blytons, Famous Five, Secret Seven, Nancy Drew vs. kinder golf, X Box, Play Station, Harry Potter. Times have changed and with it so have the games children play.
I fondly remember my childhood and often recount my favorite childhood pastime – coloring. I still remember my “Jumbo Coloring Book” – a big fat sunny yellow book with over 500 pictures within its pages, just waiting to be brought to life by the color I choose to fill in. I used to gleefully open my book, place it on the mattress of my bed and kneel on the floor and color away with my camel color pencils or camel crayons. The steadler felt pen set from an Aunt visiting from abroad was taken out on occasions just to outline the picture. Each day I would add color to several pictures, a mother duck with her three ducklings behind her, an elephant playing with a ball, a clown with a bunch of balloons, a girl frolicking about. If it were pencils on Monday then it would be crayons on Tuesday and paints on Wednesday. Care was taken to color strictly within the lines.
Besides “coloring” I loved to read. Enid Blyton scored some brownie points as she entertained me with “The Naughtiest Girl in School”, “Amelia Jane Does it Again”, “Mr. Meddles Muddles”, “The Enchanted Woods”, “The Faraway Tree” and oh the list is endless. When I look back at these books today, I am bemused that these amazingly simple stories had once upon time caught my fancy. I have passed on my treasure trove of books to my lil niece and I wonder if those very same pages that I leafed through time and again, now yellowed and spotted, will catch her fancy as well? Or will the Harry Potters of today’s world take precedence? I guess time will tell.
Tiny wooden utensils made for little fingers to play with, colored in turmeric and vermillion, green and purple, lil kodams (Tamil term for utensils meant to fetch water) to fetch some water in, a chakki (Hindi term for a household device meant to grind wheat manually) to grind wheat into flour, tub shaped vessels to hold imaginary food and real grains of rice – my chopu (Tamil term for miniature kitchen set) set – now becoming a thing of the past. There was a time when the famous chopu set, neatly encapsulated in a palm leaf box was readily available outside temples and was part of every little South Indian girl’s toys, but today we had to literally hunt high and low to get one for my niece. I’m so glad I have an odd piece or two in my “house house” assortment, all filled in a tin box sitting somewhere in the attic. The house-house (literal translation of the Hindi equivalent ghar-ghar) game was universal among little girls and I personally loved spending hours, preparing tea and pouring them in steel cup and saucers and carrying it carefully to mom in the afternoons or preparing an elaborate lunch and packing it in my brass Tiffin carrier. I even had a steel idly plate to make steaming hot idlys. Today I do see versions of the ghar ghar set, but the idly plate has given way to a plastic bulls eye and pink colored fork and knives – all packed in a transparent plastic bag hanging from the roof of a fancy store.
Outdoor games constituted the simple Lock & Key, Four Corners, Hide and Seek, Dark Room, Races, Badminton with the gate of the house serving at the net and I guess that’s about it. But today my eyes widened when I heard and saw about “Kinder golf”. Kinder Golf is a unique preschooler golf instructional environment specially designed to groom the next generation of very good golfers- boasts its website. I hadn’t heard about golf until my teens let alone kinder golf! Another eye opener was a TV show called “Baby Ballroom Championship” where children aged between six and eleven, competed for the title of Baby Ballroom Champion. Here were children dressed and behaving and dancing like grown ups – not just any dancing but the waltz, cha cha cha, samba and what not.
Not having touched a single video game in my life I can’t talk much on the subject but I have noticed that most kids on the train tout their PSP games, nimble fingers jabbing at buttons, eyes riveted on the screen, oblivious to the world. When a friend of mine asked me get an X Box for her son, I had to run a search on the internet to find out what the “X Box” was all about!
And who knows, just as how I am blogging about divergent childhood games/interests between generation X and igeneration, 30 years down the line this very same igeneration may be lamenting about the differences between their playthings viz. the x box, psps et al and playthings of generation 2038.
