Talent must not remain latent

Every child has a passion for a particular thing or activity which are either reflective of his hidden talent or the ability to develop talent. He or she gets deeply attached to it emotionally, in most cases for the entire life. Remember the slogan about a cricketer, "He eats cricket, he drinks cricket, he sleeps cricket"?

We have such obsessed people in practically all fields, be it music, fine arts, book reading and the like. Fast driving is among the latest fads of the day.

In my case, it was a toy railway engine that turned me crazy in my childhood and then kept me engaged in one way or the other during the later years. In my earlier period, I practically ate, railways, drank railways and slept railways. The toy engine was gifted by a friend of my father. In those pre-Independence days, most of the toys were imported from Japan. Plastic had not been evolved till then. Made of tin, the engine had a key to wind its funnel.

When the presenter demonstrated its functioning, the little engine chugged its way ahead majestically on its track. The child in me was thrilled, my eyes set on its wheels and their movement. One question that kept teasing this kid's brain was: Since the wheels were not made like those moving on the cable cars or in a crane, why the engine did not come off the rails?

Emphasis

To find an answer on my own, I collected some railway wheel-shaped lids of empty tooth powder cans. Using improvised axles, these were fixed under empty cartons of fountain pen inkpots. Windows were cut out and the bogies painted in the required colours. To make the couplings that join the bogies, as realistically as possible, appropriate hooks and clips were arranged. I got little wooden sleepers cut to hold the tracks. Despite lack of proper material, my anxiety was to make exact prototypes as far as possible, with emphasis on correct ratio and proportion.

Now was the time to try out the model. Placed on tracks made of candy floss sticks, the train moved smoothly. It did not derail. A solution had been found. The crazy child in me was simply joyous. In the months that followed, improvements were made in the toy train.

An entire railway yard had come up on a table. Signals complete with red and green lights, strings and levers to lower them were provided. Pulling the lever from a distance to lower the signal to green position thrilled me.

The creation of a railway bridge over a rivulet with appropriately painted piers and girders to hold the tracks involved some extra effort. But it was accomplished successfully. With provision of interchanges, the little train could now change tracks and go to another platform.

Whosoever saw it, could not help admiring the effort and skill that had gone into building a near perfect railway yard model. But nobody knew that this "construction" took place late in the night when parents were asleep.

In retrospect, I find that it is this dedication or madness many people have for their hobbies that does not let them get normal sleep and meals. One might deride it as childhood craziness but certainly it is this passion that, in today's context, makes cricketers such as Tendulkars, Dhonis and the like.

Unfortunately, unlike today, there were practically no avenues those days to encourage kids to give vent to their creativity. Quite often talent died in the womb. For most parents, such activities were sheer wastage of time and energy, which ought to be spent only in studies.

Mercifully, with the passage of time and advent of television, trends changed. How I wish there were a time machine in those days to transport me into the future!

Lalit Raizada is a journalist based in India.