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In the late 1940s, when I was a kid, all toys were made of metal, hard rubber, and nails. The soft plastics revolution reached India two decades later.
The first gift I remember Father gave me was a tricycle. It was all metal and nails except for the tires and handle grips and seat which were of hard rubber and these cracked within a month and peeled off leaving the bare metal rims and handles and pedals and nails. These hurt like hell but I couldn't care less. I bled profusely in my ankles and hands but the tincture of iodine was always there and it was a classic case where the cure hurt more than the bleed. But I was as fast as the breeze and showed off to my friends and onlookers.
One morning I was riding the damn thing making furious circles on the pyol in front of our home:
And a street urchin who was watching me with envy suddenly thrust his stick in front of my front wheel and I and my trike took a tumble and fell down on the road like sacks of coal. Nothing happened to my vehicle but I had a bleeding forehead which had a 1" cut and had to be stitched up in the local hospital and gifted me a permanent mark on the head which served as one of the two identification marks in my school final register.
The next hard thing I remember using was our 'rubber' that was given to us to erase our howlers in the school made with an equally hard pencil:
I used to show it off to my physics students when they visited my home at IIT KGP. Of course the explanation was simple enough but the beauty of this bird was that the periods of its swings on its wings was precisely twice its vertical oscillations. Some nice demo there of the tensor nature of moment of inertia and its eigenvlaues and eigenstates.
It was a decade later that I saw the really soft toys that I bought for Ishani which didn't have a single nail or metal to hurt her. But before she arrived, my son one day bought a huge soft toy like a teddy bear and I asked him who it was for, and he shyly said:
"To my new wife who wished to use it as a comforter"
...Posted by Ishani
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In the late 1940s, when I was a kid, all toys were made of metal, hard rubber, and nails. The soft plastics revolution reached India two decades later.
The first gift I remember Father gave me was a tricycle. It was all metal and nails except for the tires and handle grips and seat which were of hard rubber and these cracked within a month and peeled off leaving the bare metal rims and handles and pedals and nails. These hurt like hell but I couldn't care less. I bled profusely in my ankles and hands but the tincture of iodine was always there and it was a classic case where the cure hurt more than the bleed. But I was as fast as the breeze and showed off to my friends and onlookers.
One morning I was riding the damn thing making furious circles on the pyol in front of our home:
And a street urchin who was watching me with envy suddenly thrust his stick in front of my front wheel and I and my trike took a tumble and fell down on the road like sacks of coal. Nothing happened to my vehicle but I had a bleeding forehead which had a 1" cut and had to be stitched up in the local hospital and gifted me a permanent mark on the head which served as one of the two identification marks in my school final register.
The next hard thing I remember using was our 'rubber' that was given to us to erase our howlers in the school made with an equally hard pencil:
The rubber was so hard that the paper got torn when we rubbed on it but nothing happened to the eraser...it lasted years and years. And when we used it to rub off our pencil marks, it left black thin long 'filings' of graphite on the paper which had to be peeled off by our hands.
A couple of decades later in our university we got soft rubber erasers which didn't tear the paper but their leavings stuck to the rubber which turned black and useless. We had to use our hand nails to peel the graphite off the eraser and I for one preferred our childhood hard rubbers. I don't know how this dichotomy was solved if it ever was.
The other toy that fascinated me was what we called 'pappu chetti' which roughly translates to our 'provision seller'. In Muthukur no one was obese at all....everyone worked and played hard and walked miles. Except for this pappu chetti who was forced to sit for the whole day in his shop ringed by his bags of rice, lentils and red chilies.
The toy that was named for him was made of two metal hemispheres that were glued and painted to look like him. When we stood the toy on its head it stood firm alright. But when we tried to tilt it and tumble it, it refused and reverted to its vertical position no matter how much we tried. We were all delighted but confused and even Father couldn't explain it to us easily:
I was reminded of this toy fifty years later when I bought on an impulse paying all of Rs 120 the Chinese version of this as a curious and lovely bird that balanced itself on my finger tip:
I used to show it off to my physics students when they visited my home at IIT KGP. Of course the explanation was simple enough but the beauty of this bird was that the periods of its swings on its wings was precisely twice its vertical oscillations. Some nice demo there of the tensor nature of moment of inertia and its eigenvlaues and eigenstates.
It was a decade later that I saw the really soft toys that I bought for Ishani which didn't have a single nail or metal to hurt her. But before she arrived, my son one day bought a huge soft toy like a teddy bear and I asked him who it was for, and he shyly said:
"To my new wife who wished to use it as a comforter"
...Posted by Ishani
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