Who has stolen all our childhood games?

There was no Nintendo, PS or X Box for us born in the sixties. Nor did we have Facebook, Insta or Whatsapp. What we did have were a host of delightful, inexpensive and ‘make rules as you play’ games to prevent us from becoming all-work-and-no-play dull Jacks. These games taught us everything that is important in life; brotherhood, team work, cheating.

Sadly, most of these simple games have vanished. Remember ‘maaram pithi?. All that this game needed was one rubber ball. A team could have five, ten, twenty or as many players as desired. All players would be divided into two teams and one team would try to strike any member of the other team with the said ball.  Every opposing player so struck would be ruled out till one team lost all players. The game needed, team work like basketball, fakes and deception like badminton, stamina of a steeplechase athlete, quicksilver reflexes of squash, and judgement of distances of a parkour specialist. However, for us simpletons, the joys of landing a full blooded throw on the fleshy posterior of an opponent, thus sending him ‘aaii  aaii’ while rubbing his tender parts, were the only things that mattered!

And what about ‘Jhaad Bandar’? (Somehow when translated to English, ‘Tree Monkey’ doesn’t sound as much fun). All that this game needed was a tall tree and astounding stupidity. The ‘den’ in this game had to tag others by chasing them up a tree! Some falls, scrapes and bruises were just par for the course. Tell me if you have ever come across a game needing more daring, more fitness, and more foolhardiness? Alas, will any ‘woke’ parent in today’s world allow their kids such ‘adventurous’ games? And even if they did, where are the trees in today’s towns and cities!

We of course also had the far more sedate marbles and tops (lattoo). While I was quite the champion at marbles, and had collected hundreds of them as bounty, the intricacies of the lattoo always left me befuddled. Now don’t get me wrong. I could spin the lattoo, and that too furiously, but for some infuriating reason, only upside down! Something to do with suppleness of the wrist I guess, cause I could never fully convert the potential energy of the lattoo into kinetic energy or deliver the requisite angular momentum to send the lattoo into precession; or some such nonsense. I have seen my particularly gifted friends flick the wrist and make the lattoo land directly on their palms, whirling away. Not me!  Based on the advice of some seemingly sincere friends, I tried a short run up, a long run up, wrist flicks, finger snaps and the round arm action; only to, as always, have the lattoo land upside down.

For most of us a catapult (gulel) was all that was needed to become a gun slinger. With one tucked into our waistband we could let our imaginations run wild as we strode our neighbourhood like Clint Eastwood. I recall I was thus wasting away a languid summer afternoon in our garden when my mom called me into the house. I jokingly pointed my single shooter at her cocked and loaded with a stone. Unfortunately for the both of us, the projectile holder slipped from my fingers and the innocent stone following Newton’s law of motion kept flying till it affected rendezvous straight with my mother’s lower lip. Once it met this external force, it dropped to the ground, along with two of my mom’s teeth. Panicked, I thought this was an opportune moment to ‘run away’ from my house and that is what I did. I ran for about 300 metres before some basic questions wrt logistics made me realise that I had not thought my plan through; What about spare underwear? Money for groceries? So I sat under a tree brooding, only to be found by my father two hours later. Now fathers those days did not worry much about abstract things like the ‘psychology of the child’. They believed in robust action. My father being more robust than most, attached himself to my left ear and with the suppleness of wrist that would make a champion lattoo exponent proud, and yanked me to my feet using my ear as a lever. The 300 metres were retraced in this comical (to others, not me) fashion with no loosening of the grip on my father’s part.

Occasionally, we ventured into cricket if one of our friends had benevolent parents who bought their offsprings, a cricket bat. Our cricket was governed by two distinct sets of rules. One set as laid down by consensus, was for all of us. The second set was for the bat owner, modified as convenient on the fly. He batted in both innings, fielded in none. He also double banked as the umpire and ruled himself out only when bored, howsoever vociferous the appeal. And because overly serious remonstrations with the umpire would lead him to pick up his bat and head home, no one really pressed too hard with ‘appeals’. ‘Spirit of the game’ you ask? Pshaw!!

We scoffed at the concept of bad light that international matches adhered to; cause our ‘matches’ generally started at about the time Gavaskar would appeal for bad light, viz 1730 hrs. We used to play well past twilight and consequently, with the ball being virtually invisible, the batting as well as fielding was accomplished more by guesswork rather than sight.

Other honourable mentions include Gilly Danda, Stapu, Langdi, Vish Amrit, Kokla Chapaki, Dog and the Bone, etc. No costly and fancy gadgets, no expensive turfs/pitches, no hard and fast rules. Just unadulterated fun, bonds of friendships and joy unbound. Sadly most are forgotten now and relived only in memories.