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While reading your recollections, I was amazed at how similar some of my experiences were while growing up several decades later in a city far away from Muthukur village. I too played with wooden tops with grooves for wrapping the string around. The kid who could flawlessly throw the top and get it to spin on the ground and pick up the spinning top on the palm of his hand with just minor perturbations may not have mastered the intricacies of rotational dynamics but sure got a lot of bragging rights.
Glass marbles, wooden badminton rackets whose strings would occasionally slacken or tear and needed restringing, playing squash against a wall with a tennis ball and bare hands; all these experiences seem quite familiar. I also distinctly remember the huge vacuum tube radios as well as the early B&W tv's for which you had to wait a while for the picture tube to warm up before a picture appeared. I guess those of us who grew up in the 70's and early 80's were part of the bridge generation who shared some similar experiences with those of your generation before Manmohan Singh's policies and the IT revolution dramatically increased
the pace of change.
Kids like Ishani and Kitto these days will never see a wooden badminton racket or a wooden toy, would most likely be too uninterested in marbles and too familiar with malls and cell phones.
They will experience life in very different ways than we did. Not necessarily a bad thing, but (as the punchline in the ad for the first hot n sweet tomato ketchup proclaimed) "its different!"
...Posted by Ishani
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Here is Supratim (MSc 1994 IIT KGP) speaking:
Dear Sir,
Yesterday I had time to finally read almost all of the blog-posts that I had put off reading for the last 2 weeks.
While reading your recollections, I was amazed at how similar some of my experiences were while growing up several decades later in a city far away from Muthukur village. I too played with wooden tops with grooves for wrapping the string around. The kid who could flawlessly throw the top and get it to spin on the ground and pick up the spinning top on the palm of his hand with just minor perturbations may not have mastered the intricacies of rotational dynamics but sure got a lot of bragging rights.
Glass marbles, wooden badminton rackets whose strings would occasionally slacken or tear and needed restringing, playing squash against a wall with a tennis ball and bare hands; all these experiences seem quite familiar. I also distinctly remember the huge vacuum tube radios as well as the early B&W tv's for which you had to wait a while for the picture tube to warm up before a picture appeared. I guess those of us who grew up in the 70's and early 80's were part of the bridge generation who shared some similar experiences with those of your generation before Manmohan Singh's policies and the IT revolution dramatically increased
the pace of change.
Kids like Ishani and Kitto these days will never see a wooden badminton racket or a wooden toy, would most likely be too uninterested in marbles and too familiar with malls and cell phones.
They will experience life in very different ways than we did. Not necessarily a bad thing, but (as the punchline in the ad for the first hot n sweet tomato ketchup proclaimed) "its different!"
...Posted by Ishani
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