Parents, poor or rich, should try encouraging their children in the areas of their interest, as my father did, to the extent possible for him.
As mentioned by me in a few of my earlier blogs, my childhood was not very illustrative comparing to many others. Due to restricted economic status (the case with most Indian families during the 1960s) I hardly had any toys to play with. We had a “Vaikunthapaali” chart (Paramapada Sopana Patam in Tamil) which is copied as Snakes and Ladders and a few cowrie shells to play the same with.
This game is actually a way of teaching the virtues in the Sanatana Dharma way, where a player will be rewarded for good acts (gets to climb ladders) or be punished (gets swallowed by a snake) by being shunted back several rungs. The player who could wade through all these, at last, will reach “Vaikuntham” the abode of the GOD.
I also had a small bullock cart with a tin roof, which I used to drag around with me led by a thin rope. These were my toys for most of my childhood, so to say. But my father did try to make up for this deficit and how!
Initially we were staying in Ramanujam Street, in T. Nagar of Madras (now Chennai), between 1957 and 1960. The street normally used to be deserted for most of the time, except in the mornings and evenings – office and school timings. On one side of the street, the government dug in and laid out a small and not a deep drainage channel and left it open for the cement to dry.
One day, pulling my bullock cart, I slowly walked out of my compound (obviously someone must have been irresponsible to keep the compound gate open) and crossed the street towards the newly constructed channel. I can’t understand, till date, why I did that. Probably curiosity to see what's being dug. Suddenly the bullock cart slid out of my hands and fell into the channel. Now, that’s the only toy I had and was so dear to me, that I couldn’t leave it there.
The channel was not very deep but deep enough for me, the short chubby guy. Still I ventured and jumped into the channel to retrieve my dear cart. I have to mention here that I did not have any sandals too. I must be three years old or a few months older, perhaps. The sun was harsh to my naked feet and they were burning like hell. When I tried to hold to the shoulder of the channel to climb out, it was high for me and my palms and fingers burned too. The pain was torturous (so much so that I can still feel the scalding heat, after all these years).
I started crying, loudly too, but my mother couldn’t hear me, as our portion of the house was way behind in the compound. The street was deserted and no pedestrian could be seen in the vicinity either. After what could have been a lifetime, someone heard my crying and while alerting my mother, ran out to me and lifted me out of the channel along with my cart. That was one day, when I really cried.
Later, we shifted to another house in the same area.
This new house had three petrol pumps nearby – Burmah Shell, very near to us, Esso and Caltex, a little away from the Burmah Shell pump (The pumps where Caltex and Esso used to be are still there though in a different name but the pump where Burmah Shell used to be, has completely closed down).
All these pumps used to give goodies to customers and children, once in a way. They sometimes used to beckon me, while I was walking on the road and hand over some pamphlets or some giveaways etc.
So, one day, when I was walking across the Burmah Shell pump, they called me and gave me a pamphlet and asked me to fill the same and submit at the earliest. They said if I submit all such papers to be issued periodically and in due course, I stand to win a gift. Though elated by the news, I wasn’t much serious, but still brought in the paper home. In the night, my father took a look at it and said "ok, fill it up". I used to be quite a timid boy and felt awkward and very hesitant to fill the same on my own, when my father said, “you attempt filling it up, if need be, I shall help you”.
It was a small sheet of paper asking questions on what should be the right and/or wrong ways of following the traffic rules. I filled it to the best of my ability, with intermittent inputs from my father. On every form, I need to write my name and address too and submit back in the same petrol pump. This happened for a few days and one day, we received a letter from Burmah Shell that I had qualified for a gift and can come and pick it up from their office in Mount Road (now Anna Salai) in Madras. On my behalf, my father collected the gift and brought it home. I can still feel the anxiety, eagerness and eventually the happiness of receiving that fine gift, which was a board game called “Safely to School”.
This game also, interestingly, follows the same platform of the “Vaikunthapaali”. Instead of rolling the dice, they gave a rotating gadget with up-to six digits and one has to spin the gadget. The number on which the needle stops is the number of steps one gets to progress. If one lands on a correct practice of traffic laws, one may jump ahead by a few more steps. If one lands on a wrong practice of traffic rules, one may be asked to go back by a few steps.
The interesting thing was with this one game Burmah Shell tried to inculcate the basic traffic etiquette and rules among the growing children. Since I was the only one who could get the game, in the neighbourhood, most of my kid friends near home, were as excited as I was, to play with me. If my memory serves me right, even my siblings could enjoy playing this game, after my time.
But then this was not the only one game my father helped me to get. After nagging him for quite a few months, he surprised me suddenly by bringing in another board game “Trade” (Monopoly in many countries). The 'money notes' given by them to play, were so flimsy that he spent a couple of days in cutting and pasting hardboard cards behind each and every note so that the game will last longer. True to expectations, it lasted decades and after losing some of the notes intermittently with every change of residence we had totally lost the game in our house, the last just a couple of months ago.
When I was about 12-13 years there used to be one “A1 Confectionery” from Bombay (Mumbai) that used to bring out a chewing gum called 'Fruiti' in different flavours. The chewing gum used to cost 10 paise per piece and apart from real tasty in different flavours, stuck to the wrapper inside used to be small pictures of animals, flags and airplanes.
By the time I got into the flow of buying them and enjoying the gum, they stopped the airplane pictures but animals were going on. Once a way, they were also providing a coupon called the 'lucky coupon' inside the chewing gum. But it is very rarely made available. If one gets the lucky coupon, by sending it to A1 Confectionery, one can get an album with few details of the animals and flags with an album dedicated seperately for each category. It was a damned craze in the city and most school students were hooked onto it. There used to be exchanges of duplicates and triplicates of the pictures. Sometimes children used to steal some too. There used to be mini fights for those.
This is where my mischievous father jumped into the fray to help me get what pictures I did not have. :-) He tied up with a neighbouring shop and used to carefully open the chewing gum packs, and check the pictures inside. If the pictures were those I did not have, he used to buy the gum. If the pictures were something that I already had, he used to carefully return the same to the shop. So with some genuine luck and also his support, I could make not one, but two animal albums. The album, for that age, was a treasure trove as I came across the knowledge of so many extinct and existing animals. So was the case of the flags of countries across the world too.
Children of today, welded to mobile phones and knowledge at fingertips, thanks to Google and other search engines and now to Artificial Intelligence (AI), are totally deprived of such excitement.
After sending the lucky coupon to A1 Confectionery, it used to take about three weeks to a month for getting the album delivered at home. There used to be an anxiety, expectation and excitement from the end of the first week onwards, with eyes on and ears for the postman (no, there was no courier service those days and no post women too).
Once the postman delivered the thick envelope containing the album, I used to go through the same time and again and start pasting the photos of the animals and flags at the appropriate place. My father used to patiently help me in that too. The day the album used to be finished, will be a time for jubilance and triumph. A completed album also used to fetch a further gift, but all the photos will be stamped with a cancellation. I didn’t want that to happen, as I treasured the albums which I have with me even now.
The man who made all these possible for me with the same enthusiasm and excitement that I had, my father, left us all on this day eight years ago, leaving us with memories of his deeds.
Wherever he is and whatever he is doing now, I do hope that he possesses the same cheer, curiosity for life, enthusiasm, excitement and a zest for life. I will take comfort to know that he had attained Sadgati.
God bless him!
Until the next,
Krutagjnatalu (Telugu), Nanri (Tamil), Dhanyavaadagalu (Kannada), Nanni (Malayalam), Dhanyavaad (Hindi), Dhanyosmi (Sanskrit), Thanks (English), Dhonyavaad (Bangla), Dhanyabad (Oriya and Nepalese), Gracias (Spanish), Grazie (Italian), Danke Schon (Deutsche), Merci (French), Obrigado (Portuguese), Shukraan (Arabic and Sudanese), Shukriya (Urdu), Sthoothiy (Sinhalese) Aw-koon (Khmer), Kawp Jai Lhai Lhai (Laotian), Kob Kun Krab (Thai), Asante (Kiswahili), Maraming Salamat sa Lahat (Pinoy-Tagalog-Filipino), Tack (Swedish), Fa'afetai (Samoan), Terima Kasih (Bahasa Indonesian) and Tenkyu (Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea), Malo (Tongan), Vinaka Vaka Levu (Fijian)
Hemantha Kumar Pamarthy
Chennai, India
