Potali or kencha (marbles), pittu garam (tennis ball and a pile of flat stones), pahari (the grid tag), paisa guchi (played with coins), patta baazi (with old cigarette packets piled one on top of the other), gulli danda, bearing gaadi (home made carts using old ball-bearings and wooden fruit crates) and so on. These were our toys and games then.
When we were kids, toys were not usually bought, but often home made by kids themselves, with whatever material that was then available: discarded shoe boxes, old bicycle and car tires, used ball-bearings we used to collect from the auto-garages on Wafa Road, discarded cigarette packets, wooden sticks for gulli danda and slingshots (ghulail), pieces of leather and cords for home-made catapults (called palkhamo in Faarsi), old metal clothesline wires for "seem gaadi" (the hand held metal guides with a U-shaped head used to roll and steer the used tires) and so on.
Our imagination and creativity then were of a totally different kind and at a different level, involving raw, unsullied imagination and both authentic intellectual and manual effort geared towards making the best possible use of our wits and of the limited available resources for the final products that we carried around in our heads and not on our iPads. There were no iPads, tablets, HDTVs, Playstations and Nintendos. The young eyes then were not trained on navigating the virtual worlds on different kinds and sizes of screens but, scavenger-like, on spotting potentially usable materials to actualize the fuzzy and funny ideas in that thing we carried on our shoulders, our heads. There were no "how to" Youtube and TikTok videos, but there were people, real community people in the form of friends, neighbors, relatives and elders who would help, guide and show us how to make and fix things. Yes, things always got fixed then and not thrown away. Everybody had a skill, especially manual skill, then.
For us kids, toys often meant making our own, and not an expensive visit to the mall or getting gadgets online from Amazon. Time, a lot of it, was spent not on choosing the make, color, design and model, but on finding materials and then putting all of them together in creative ways. It was the entire process, that process of actually creating something from almost nothing, often from discarded materials, that was the most satisfying of all whether it was assembling a three-wheeler cart with old, greasy ball bearings, or constructing a slingshot with pieces of carefully scrapped and neatly wedged sticks and rubber strips cut from used and discarded bicycle tubes, or coating kite strings with finely ground glass and liquid raisin glue (seeraish) to prepare "manja" during the kite-flying season in the brutally dry and cold winter months of January and February. The cold, too, was extreme then, in the Quetta of 1970s.
Just like everything else, the toys were also a reflection of the ethos of the time, of old Quettawaali: simplicity, frugality, humility and modesty, contentment with the essentials of life and a detached attitude towards what was ostentatious, trivial or secondary.
(Dervaish Ali, Quetta walla)
No comments:
Post a Comment