As I caught up on some TV during the weekend, the aired cartoons brought back my childhood memories floating by.
I was brought up in a sleepy little town called Khetri (a mammoth copper mines PSU eating away the government resources) of about 4 sq. km. in area set in the royal state of Rajasthan (about 2 hrs away from Pilani of BITS fame and around 200Km away from Delhi and Jaipur). We kids in that place never had the privileges of big city kids who had theatres, summer camps, Apu ghar's et al - but we were always happy.
Nothing moved faster in the town than gossip. The kitty parties never failed to create rippling stories. And then these stories by word of mouth and exclusive culinary skills of the passers ended up in our laps to be devoured ruthlessly. Well the opening up of the Indian economy (end of the PSUs) and the start of big soaps (I still remember Shanti as an answer to "Bold and the Beautiful" and "The Santa Barbara") did unsettle those gossip rings to a certain extent but there has been no institution formed in the world to put a complete end to such entertaining endeavours.
During summer vacations if I was not touring the Southern India to get acquainted with ever growing number of relations, it would be the only time in the year when we heared the rooster crowing - for all of the "future citizens of the country" were up by 5 am sharp only to be in the field honing their cricketing skills. This continued for another few hours till the merciless Sun drove them back into the comforting cool of desert coolers of their homes. Sunday mornings used to be He-man's, Ramayan's and then Mahabharat's as years progressed.
Vacation handwriting assignments were meant to be completed only in the last week of the vacations. Rest of the day was spent gossiping at friends places, playing badminton at local club or catching up on the sleep. Summers were a time for sweet lemonades, refreshing roohafzah's, juicy water melons, ice candy's, sugar cane juice and a lot more.
Summers also did bring in some fun activities. Various competitions at the club were a usual occurrence. The best being jalebi race - where the contenders had their hands tied behind. They were to run to a rope which had jalebis dangling in the air, rip the jalebis into their mouths and run back to the finish lines. As time passed by and we matured, the competition only meant eating jalebis - the race was left to the youngsters to be completed while we partied carelessly on the jalebis.
Another exciting day I still remember was a painting or rather a colouring competition. I must have been very young for I do not recollect my height and weight then. I do remember this incident because my parents never fail to constantly remind me of my skills akin to Da Vinci's. On the appointed day we were given a man's sketch to be coloured. There came my vivid colourful imagination to full and I was determined to use all my crayons. I let that man have one leg in blue and the other in green colour. He was also not going to have a colourless face. The face got a red. Luckily the hair got black (all the probability theory at it's best). The other colours are not worth recollecting because they formed his clothes. Anyways, I stood first in the competition. Surely other "Mona Lisa's" of my competitiors were not colourful.
The evenings again used to be dotted with cycling, cricket and soccer followed by family social visits - again a way for parents to catch up on gossip. For us kids it used be extra bonus play time.
Suddenly, the school reopening seemed just around the corner. So came the rush to buy new books. The english and hindi text books wouldn't last for more than a day by which time I would have devoured all the stories. Then came the time to cover the books, new shoes, socks, school bags and uniforms and get going with handwriting assignments. No body would belive me that I wrote these assignments for almost 9 years of my schooling life. We were pointlessly asked to write 1 page of hindi and 1 page of english handwriting assigment per day for the whole vacation. We completed that in the last 1 week.
The first 2 days in school just flew by as we exchanged vacation stories with one another. The schools dragged on till the next long break - the christmas break. A full 10 day vacation. The winter chill kept us indoors mostly. But this was a time to feast on "gajar halwas". In that part of the country, sakranth (or pongal or uttarayan -as known in other parts of the country) was a time for kite flying wars. So christmas vacation inaugrated the kite season and yours truely though never being an excellent kite flyer was always among the first to run on streets to catch a kite that has been lost by its owner in a kite fight. The ensuing heated quarrels with all the locals in rags carrying thorny branches never dissuaded me. So much was the craze that I did happen to go to hospital once to get stitches on my finger owing to a quarrel.
Though those days will never come back, I do realise that not all children have the same fun today owing to educational pressures, working mothers and priority of video games over kite flying. What a pity.