children ... childhood memories and miscellaneous balderdash

Yesterday, I saw a kid standing under a street light with a place mat on his head, engrossed in playing with his own shadow. When kids don't have too many toys to play with, the only thing they are left with is their own imagination.

I wonder whether parents stifle the imagination of their kids these days by pampering them with too many toys ... or whether having the toys just helps them imagine bigger and better things - I doubt if this is the case though.

I had toys as a kid but never too many. My brother and I preferred to make our toys. We'd design vehicles using discarded medicine boxes with bottle caps for wheels and aluminium wires for axles. We'd spend a lot of time in the undergrowth on the border of the forest, playing vague games and generally hacking through with machetes fashioned out of bamboo. These were made by the local people that worked for my dad and were pretty effective and sharp.

At other times, we'd play in the garden. I remember digging a small circle in order to create an island. We would then fill the "moat" with water and spend the rest of the day collecting ants of different types and putting them there to see whether they would fight!

Chasing dragonflies and butterflies was another option ... and you could always eat sweet peas while at eat .. picking the pods straight off the vines.

When it was too hot or cold to be outside, we'd find things to do inside the house ... we'd make boats out of paper ... and sometimes more complicated constructs that we'd call "steamers". We'd then collect water in a sink and float them around.

At times, things got a tad more dangerous - though we didn't realize it then. Dad was posted in a border area that had seen some fighting during the war with China. So, it was quite easy to find spent ammunition in the garden as we pottered about. Brother and I were extremely interested in the darker stuff that we could see within the casing. We assumed it was not gunpowder since the bullet had already been shot ... so we collected a bunch of them, put them into a tin pencil box and shoved it into the fireplace (yup we had a fireplace in the kitchen in those days) early in the morning ... while parents were still asleep.

So there we were, crouched next to the fire place ... luckily for us, nothing exploded. We retrieved the box from the fire after a while and realized that the dark stuff had melted out and solidified again in weird designs ... it was lead I suppose.


That was when dad barged into the kitchen ... and the rest as they say is history :)


I feel sorry for the kids I see around me these days. Cramped within their houses, boxed in tiny vans to school, confined into classrooms with a bunch of disgruntled teachers to teach them ... boxed into a van back home ... and boxed into the home again ... with a maid perhaps instead of a parent or grandparent to take care of them ...


Guess it is no wonder that they behave the way they do ... our generation is so busy earning money that they probably wont realize till much later what a dysfunctional bunch of people they are helping create.


I hope they will realize what went wrong with them as kids and they shall take pains to give their children a better childhood ... and life shall have come back full circle.