Games people play

Board games - how many of them did you buy for your children( which they will never use)? TV does not let them. I used to buy for my son  25 in 1 games, 10 in 1games  and so on, chess board, ludo etc. from 1-2-3 rial shops in Muscat. (rial is the currency in Oman and 1 rial was around 90 Rs then) May be some of them are lying still there in the atta somewhere.

   But what we did we play in our childhood? To give an example,  we used to play some kind of pagade which will be something like this. You do not have to buy the board. as we could draw it on the floor. The floor was red oxide at the most, so we can draw these using chalk. And we did not even used to buy dice, mom used to split tamarind seeds in half. So 4 of them can be thrown. Face down is one and face up is zero. And each person will have 4 pieces on the board. These pieces would be broken bangle pieces (different color for each ) or something similar. Then my grand father has made a real board called chennemane from carpentar - of course free of cost, carpentar has done some other work, along with which this was to be done.

I do not say we were brought up in poverty, we never felt that we were not well to do.  Definitions of luxury was different at that time. A Board game, a story book, a toy all these were considered as luxury. Yes, when compared to our previous generation, our generation had a comfortable life. ( I was reading K.T.Gatti's autobiography "Teera". When he went for his first job on first day, he had only 2 shirts and one of them was torn on which he had sewn some design) But look at our children, they have everything, still they keep fighting complaining that we do not buy anything for them. My son recently bought an electric guitar of seventeen thousand. I am not jealous of them. May be a little bit. But do they really value the things they get so easily? Do they feel as happy as us when we played pagade or hop-scotch when they play their toys worth thousands of rupees?