Remember the time when you used to wait all year for those summer breaks. Where you thought you would do everything you had been planning for? Childhood is a romance, a looking glass of many colours through which we saw life. Even decades later, remembering our school days brings us joy. Back then, modern technological advancement was unheard of. Even having a landline phone was considered a luxury. Let alone owning a vehicle ( Even a two wheeler for that matter)
Childhood memories are always sweet, especially for the generations that did not have T.V. and all the screen gadgets that followed. Our memories are of real people with whom we interacted , talked ,laughed, fought, and made up. We did real things like playing outdoors , dancing, singing etc. What fun it was playing hide and seek in the sprawling house and on the swings in the backyard. Visiting a cinema was restricted to twice or thrice a year, after mid- terms and annual exams. So we were eagerly awaiting early exams for the very joy we begot in seeing a movie. We never imagined that sometime in the future, we could have the world in our hands with just a click of a button.
One room in the house turned into an entertainment den with a cot as a stage. Visiting our grandparents place was such a bliss , because it was one favorite place to many of us that is close to our hearts. We lived a life in a slow lane ,if it can be called that . We played games with no regard for time or place. They were simple to make and inexpensive. A flat pebble sufficed for Kunte bille ( hopscotch) a line drawn across the road served as a arena for kabbadi ,who kho, chillki, you get the idea.
As kids we needed so little to be happy when ” adventures ” meant just taking to the ” woods” near our homes ,with some potatoes and a matchbox in hand ,in a typical secret seven manner. We would roast the potatoes, and eat them as if in a jungle, though there weren’t any around, just a few ragtag trees strung together.
Those were the days of few luxuries and limited needs. We bought necessary stationary items like pencils and rubbers. Pencil menders , considered a luxury, were not included in the shopping list as we relied on Panama and Topaz blades , given by our elders after they were used for shaving to mend our pencils.
Then ,schools were not costly. Stationary stores sold next and note books and satisfied our hunger. Wrapping paper to cover our books had great demand. Labels with prints of animals, Birds and flowers were given free by the sellers. We used cooked rice as glue in the absence of adhesives to paste the labels. Our teachers inspired us to save writing paper, which prompted us to visit a printing press nearby with unused ruled and unruled sheets from our notebooks. We received a bound book that we used as a rough book for everything.
As we moved to higher classes ink pens became became a passion and Brill ink a favourite brand. With it came an ink filter and ink eraser. We used pieces of chalk to roll over pages to absorb spilled ink.
In our narrow world view, our children can still be only the clichéd doctors or engineers. If your child does study in the art stream by choice, the obvious inference is that he or she wasn’t good enough to get economics or science.
Children as young as seven or eight years are spending their evenings in tuition classes, the herd mentality of parents continues to beva revelation. We now have a generation of extremes, either staring without blinking at the I pads or learning how to study by rote. It is not the child’s fault. We parents no longer let them smell the earth.
But yes, if we thought the innocence of childhood was lost in this hi – tech age ,Tom Stoppard educate us otherwise. ” if you carry your childhood with you, you never become older” . And the age of innocence remains. But today’s children are, most of the time glued to their mobile phones with little or no physical exercise. Even parents are engrossed in their own affairs. Is it enough if children have all the comforts of home but not the company of parents? Aren’t we already seeing deteriorating relationships? I believe that providing our children with all of the luxuries us secondary, rather we must also develop an emotional bond with them which will go a long way toward establishing a solid foundation for their future endeavors and is the basis for healthier society.
