Fuchsia fun

What would you expect to find in the shelves and drawers of a nine-year-old child today? A sheaf of comics, some CDs, Playstation games and story books? Not very long ago, before the advent of television, the shelf of a child that age was a veritable treasure trove.

Of course the obvious - books and comics - were there, but in the smaller drawers there were niches and smaller boxes that contained the most inane things.

There would be broken glass bangles to make kaleidoscopes, beautiful, translucent marbles that served as the most effective currency of exchange for any kind of barter, coloured bits of paper, torn off old cards and magazines to decorate kites, old matchboxes to store live worms and beetles, small tear-aways from old handkerchiefs and saris to make innovative clothes for dolls, magnifying glasses, magnets, compass, broken knives, forks, spoons ... it was an amazing array of some of the most priceless things for any child.

I mourn the loss of that richness of innovation where we hardly went to the market to buy the latest toy. Instead, it was imagination that worked overtime here as we invented a new game each afternoon and improvised on the stuff we kept in our drawers.

Flying kites with pride

No two summer afternoons were the same. If one day we spent hours making our own kites with the paper we stored in our drawers and flew them with pride, the next day would be spent doing up a doll's house and creating a new wardrobe for the balding doll I had.

The focus on holidays was to have as much fun as we could and the leader of the gaggle would usually declare what we were to do for the rest of the afternoon.

If for instance, he decided it was to be an "outdoor" day, we would all run out into the garden, pluck inane vegetable from the runners on the kitchen garden patch, create an instant fire from twigs and proceed to cook "yucky" stuff that we ate with great glee and delight. No mothers screamed about hazards or stomach bugs; everything was fine as long as we played in the garden patch.

It might sound like we had a lot of space, but in a small patch of green outside a cramped Mumbai apartment there wasn't much space. The space was all in the mind and left to our own devices, we were little princesses and princes in our own right.

Bored with outdoors, we would sometimes retreat to the "tiniest attic in town" in our house where we had created a little hideout, complete with old rugs, stack of comics and a jug of lemonade. When I see it today, I wonder how five and sometimes seven of us fitted into that little box-like space.

But there was a mad rush among kids in our apartment complex, to block a space in that attic. Sometimes we would hang out for the whole day in that place, listening to music and reading comics and staying out of everyone's hair.

There was never a dull moment and games were invented on the spur. When I look at the poverty of ideas in kids today who sit all dressed in their Nike T-shirts and shoes in their well decorated rooms with gleaming plasmas and joysticks and still trying to nail the elusive thing they call "fun" I feel sad for them.

They seek a vicarious thrill in the virtual world, killing and combating dragons and villains that are as shadowy and unreal as their boxed 3-D world. The line that we often hear: "So many channels and nothing on" for our cables has become a metaphor for the quality of fun they have.

Somewhere in the labyrinthine hollows of the mind, the pure screams of joy and glee echo in my mind and I wonder will we ever have a revival of those days when fun was free and sprung from the fountains of an unbounded imagination.