I really pity today’s city kids.

I am sure many of you have seen Malgudi Days, and some of you may immediately recollect those golden days of childhood and relate to the simple kid on the show, Swami. Whenever I see that show, I feel as though my life is being screened on the show.

I remember all those days when I used live in our village until my age of seven. I used to run behind my grand father following him to our farm house where we had buffalos and chicken, corn and cotton fields all around the farm house. There was this small stream of fresh water flowing all along the fields and we had to walk on a very narrow stone-slab to cross the stream that was about two feet deep and 6 to 8 feet wide. Everybody now says that I am very fast in everything I do, and still perform accurately and consistently. Well, I guess that trait of mine has developed right from my childhood, and every time I fail, I learn something new that helps me do it better the next time. All this started at that tender age. Every time I used to run behind my grand father, invariably I used to end up falling into the stream while running over the narrow stone slab. At the age of 5, many would have turned hydrophobic. But that’s when I lost fear of water. Initially my grand father used to help me out of the water, but after few times I learnt to get out on my own and continue the run. After a while, I could run on the narrow stone-slab without falling. At that age after all the falls continuous running, I was neither hydrophobic nor tachophobic.

All the kids in the village (including me) would be at one single place studying, playing, fighting, climbing trees, swimming in the lake holding buffalos’ tails, playing hide ‘n’ seek in the fields spread over hundreds of acres, chasing foxes away from the cattle, while our parents were busy working in the fields. Our school was run by the village panchayat and funded by the state government. There was a single room and a single teacher for all students from class one to class five. Students of each standard used to sit in one row each in the room, all on the floor. No footwear, no benches, no lights. English was something alien and unheard off. And what was the motivation for us to go to school while we could have all the fun out in the fields? Mid-day meals. Yes. We would sometimes forget to carry our slates or chalk, but never the plate and glass. We used to get to eat hot rice with either dal or sambar, and curds.

Our parents used to go to the fields as early as 5:00 AM as they had to walk for almost 10 kilometers and had to reach before the first rays of the sun to avoid walking in the scorching heat. So, we used to play till 9:00 AM, pick up the school bags (made of fertilizer/urea bags) and head to school. Each row of students used to get attention for a while, and then we were on our own while the teacher was attending students of the other rows (standard). We used to read, write, talk, get punished and finally the lunch. School used to close by 4:00 PM, and the rest of the day was for us to play, loaf around the entire village until we were hungry. We used to get so much tired by evening that the only thing we did was to have a cold water bath, eat our dinner and sleep before 9:00 PM. No TV, no big homework; perfect life for a child.

Life for me changed a little after coming to Bangalore, but not the fun, sports and all the games we used to play at school and after school. In fact, I used to get to play more variety of games here in Bangalore than my small village. Things have changed a lot now. Back then, when we were playing all games on the streets, what we were doing was not just building ourselves physically, but also building ourselves mentally, psychologically and scientifically, but without our own knowledge and consciousness. Now when I sit down alone and think of my childhood, I realize how much I learnt in all those seemingly simple games and sports. How much it has helped me build myself to what I am today. There are many more like me out there who may or may not have realized it consciously, but are highly successful. If you have seen the behavior of animal babies in the wild, you will realize that their seemingly playful acts and movements are nature’s way of training them for the tough life that lies ahead, be it the hunter or the hunted. Our life is no different, as long as we don’t interfere with the nature’s way.

Let me bring couple of those to the foreground and highlight what the city kids these days lack and how the parents are interfering with the nature’s way of making them fit for the survival. It could be due to the ignorance of the parents or the unrealistic and unhealthy competition that is built into the urban society.

We used to play with marbles on the streets wherever there was little shade from the trees. At that time, what mattered was winning more marbles. A healthy competition was built into our group. We used to win sometimes, lose sometimes, and when lost, we try better the next time. We were ignorant of all the tough life and competition that lay ahead of us in the future. For that moment, filling the pockets with more marbles was all that mattered. In the process, we learnt some skills; concentration, aiming, judgment, decision making and subconscious calculation. If I had to strike a marble few meters away with another marble in my hand, I had to subconsciously calculate the distance, the accurate direction, the speed at which I should strike and when to strike. The same applied when I had to hit one marble with another such that the later goes into a small hole. There was so much skills and talent required to achieve this. And playing it again and again over the years only perfected the skills. Does Tiger Woods do anything different?

These days, I hardly see any kid with marbles in the hands. Instead, they play pool on the computers. They need no special skills to win a game because the computer does all the calculations for them. After a while, the game gets so mechanical that it hardly has anything new to learn. Instead, if he was out there on the streets playing marbles, he has to play differently on different surfaces like mud, cemented roads, dynamically change strategies to win under different circumstances, and above all, he gets to grow normally under the sun, fresh air below the trees and not end-up being a couch-potato.

Flying kites is my all-time favorite sport, and many kids in the block would dread the day when I used to go onto the terrace of my building with my kites and the “manja thread”. “Manja thread”, is a special thread made out of the ordinary cotton or polyester thread with a special process. The process in itself involves a lot of time and skills. The items required to prepare manja may vary a little from region to region, but the basic requirement is the same. We need to stick real tiny and well ground particles of glass onto the cotton or polyester thread. For that, we used to go around the neighborhood looking for old tube-lights, bulbs etc, that was easy to grind. Once we had sufficient quantities of them, we used to use flat granite stones to grind the glasses into fine powder. Once the glass power was ready, we used to boil a substance called “vanjra” (a sticky substance like rubber) in water and add a good color to it. Once this mixture reaches the boiling point, we take it away from the heat source and make sure it’s not diluted too much, else it will not be sticky enough and the glass powder will not stick well to the thread. Once this preparation cools down, we pass the thread into the mixture and as the wet and sticky thread comes out, we lace it with the fine powder of glass. Once it dries, we roll it on to a spindle. With this special thread and sufficiently big enough kite, we were ready for the war in the skies. Believe me; the thread is sharp enough to cut any part of the body, telephone cables across buildings and any soft object that comes in its way. And that’s exactly what it’s meant for. Cut. Cut other’s kites in the sky to prove your supremacy. When kites are flying and you believe that your skills and “manja” is better than others’, then you entangle your kite’s thread with another’s and allow the kite to go ahead pulling more thread from your spindle. This creates a sawing phenomenon and cuts the other’s kite. But, always be ready for that surprise. You me be the hunter, or the hunted. However good your manja is, it will become weak after a few battles, unless you are intelligent enough not to use it more than a few times.

There are many things involved in emerging as a winner. A lot of science is involved and analytical skills are built. Geometrical size and shape of the kite (more surface area on the kite creates more tension on the thread), wind speed and direction, distance of the target kite, the length of the thread you have, the angle at which you kite if flying, and the weight created by the tension and distance of the thread. The distant the target kite, you will need bigger kite to maintain the tension on the thread and supremacy in height. It’s like a cheetah moving slowly close to its prey unseen, and finally sprinting the final distance with a surprise attack. You need to be precise, quick and maneuver the kite with such great skill that your opponent stands no chance of winning.
How many kids these days have ever seen a kite? A little more sunlight and they stay indoors. A little rain and they stay cozy at home munching on junk food. I, along with a few old-timers like me had organized a session in our colony to teach kids to fly kites. I was really shocked to see that many kids dint even know how a kite looks in real and how it even flew. All that they knew was, “K for Kite”.

Such seemingly simple and regular games and sports played and enjoyed by kids in villages and rural areas involve such high-levels of science, skills and talent that they aid in the overall physical and mental development of the children at the right time. The kids in the cities are so much mechanical and lazy that they are seen outside only waiting for their school busses. We used to walk 15 kilometers up and down each day to school. Today, many children don’t even walk that distance in months. They need pick-up and drop door-to-door. Most of them cannot see without lenses, lack the amount of physical fitness and resistance that kids in the villages and rural areas possess. Parents think that energy drinks and calcium pills can substitute natural growth. They think that chavanprash will boost their immune system, while the lab tests by a famous TV channel on few such ayurvedic preparations have proved that all these so called immune system boosters have high levels of Mercury, Lead and Arsenic content that are dangerous for human body. They think that once a year summer-camps can substitute the gradual and constant development over the years. They think that 15 days of cricket camps will make them fit enough for competitions. They think that coaching them in a different sport every summer will make them the masters of their lives. And why do they do all these? Not because the kid is really interested in taekwondo or kung-fu, but because their neighbor’s son or daughter is going for those camps/classes. They want their kids to study in “International Schools”, why? Because their neighbor’s son is going there, and why their son should be any less in the rat race;

So much of peer pressure, so much of an unrealistic competition at a very young age, when they should be out there playing and let nature aid their growth instead on drinks laced with chemicals and artificial nutrients. They have such weak immune systems that the medicine industry selling over-the-counter drugs are making tons of money. I don’t ever remember going to a doctor except when I injure myself seriously during sports or a major fall from my bicycle. Why do the parents want to push the limits? What do they achieve? They just bring up another individual who will only build more such unhealthy competition, raise introverts who lead a mechanical life. These are the people who cannot change the flat tire of their car when they grow up. These are the people who will grow up to be pessimists. They are the ones who dare not question the wrong in the society. They are the ones who prefer to be one among the crowd. If this continues, India as a nation may become rich because they run their brains in a direction that they are told to, but can never dare to do things differently. They never fight for their rights expecting somebody else to do it for them. Why, because they never did anything on their own in their childhood either. Even the cycle they used to ride around the house was transported to their home in a car.

What we need now is not mechanical and evolutionary parenting, but a change. People who revolutionize and get back to the natural ways of parenting; we need parents who can dare to let their children to do the learning naturally and not spoon-feed them. Parents who don’t think letting a child play in the mud will make him sick; parents who think that outdoor sports are better than computer games; parents who realize that only academic percentages don’t make a complete and intelligent man, but the natural survival techniques will. Because, however powerful a computer is, it only does what it is told to. Even the most intelligent computer on the planet is only “Artificially Intelligent”, while the human brain has the power to learn, innovate, redefine the normal and invent. There is no point in training a child to reinvent the wheel. He will end up doing only that all his life which has no real use.