Utopia : The Land of My Soul
Monday, November 06, 2006
Childhood-ed, Bowled and...
The tag tad has wolloped again towards me. And I have to give it a run as Matthew volleyed the googly. But being a fan of Sachin, the master blaster, am not afraid of it. I have hauled the ball that has pitched in and am enjoying the shot. Ah enough of my euphemism! Let's come to the point. Writing about childhood memories is like a tour to nostalgia. How chimeric it seems to seize the noddy, juvenile pleasures! The sylph-like shadowy flashback of those merry days have now become a a healing touch to the troubled mind, a psalm to the soul. I know I am carried away by the recollections. Feeling too hob-nobbed with memories to jot down anything. Oki here they go.
Fantasmoglorias of my green girlhood
1) As a tiny bopper, I remember being an obsessed collector of certain
worthless things. (Here it's worthwhile to remind that I was no Lara Croft, the bone collector, but a collector of items generally termed as 'useless' or 'grub' by the adult world) My hobby was to gather multi-coloured pebbles, specially those with satin smooth feel and slightly on the side of uncommon shades. I went to hunt them during the long vacations and spent hours hoarding them. Wherever I vacationed, site-seeing meant pebble fishing. And I made a point to bring them back home, tidy them up from the squalor and pack them and trash them into the darkest corners of my cupboard. Sundays afternoon, I used to inspect which one won the 'most-appealing' pagent-title. Gone are those days of simpleton-like child's play.
2) This one I guess is a chronic girl sport. Yes, mothering dolls.
Those lazy afternoons on which I teamed up with my younger sibling to cook a sumptuous meal for our week-long unfed dolls. What prolific cuisines we made out of the leaves, sand and peels of vegetables that we insidiously managed from the kitchen! (Sorry folks don't remember the recipes, or else our country's poverty would have been slashed down by now)
3) Not to forget those tom-boyish antics that were a part of my
schooling. I was a total freak at school and lunch sessions were my time to champion the cause of nuisance. Right from bungy jumping from desk to desk (during lunch breaks classroom ground was always a 'not my type' place to trod on), to bantering the meek, to competing with the guys of our class in stamp-stamp(an innovative game in which the players had to scurry
after the fellow classmates to dust on the white imprint of the blackboard duster on their skirts and pants), to getting into a mock row with the guys and trailing after them...I did them all effortlessly. Why lunchtime?? Coz folks I was the monitress of the class all through and later on the School Captain. So class hours were hours to be a ringmaster of the zoo.
4) I cherish those girl-talks with my girl group, investing the grey matter to ferret out solutions to their perpetual problems
(read those of the heart) and surrepticiously eyeing our senior charming princes. Well, that was always a peer-pressure folks (disHONESTLY)
5) I miss those co-curricular activities of the school...
those competitions in which I always felt the urge to bag prizes just to boost my ego and somehow the quests were fructified. (Had to be honest this time)
6) I die to have those winter days with molten gold sun shimmering on the quilts,
unfurled on the rooftop, that would engulf my kid sis and me, both, in its smugness, and we would break into peals of chuckles when Mom failed to spot us and ended up with those infamous angry tirades.
7) The unadulterated ecstasy of being crushed. I had scuba-dived into
and out of crushes on the screen honchos. I was frenzied into buying posters, scissoring out their pics from newspapers and then walling them out from father's sight.
The Great Wall of china will vye this list if I don't trim it here.
The Flip Side
1) Drinking milk everyday with those yucky, God-forbidden health drinks. Even till date, the smell of it makes me want to puke.
2)Those injust perpetrations imposed on me in a futile effort to cow me down.
Those unwritten writs pegged my "born free" soul. Line-of-controls like - no listless lazying in the afternoons, curbed TV watching, coming back home from the playground as soon as the Sun dozes off to sleep, scanty of cash to squander, no experimentation with gadgets and no flaunting of creativity on the poor, inanimated walls of the rooms etc. dampened my spirits and gave a feeling of being claustrophobic.
3) Expulsion from the place where the adults huddled to gossip. Not that I was much of a gossip monger, but the inquisitivity would simply have had the better of me. I abhorred the idea of being expunged and packed off to other rooms only because I didn't qualify in age.
4) Those pedagogical lecturs from the relatives in droning, remorseless voices on my despicable state of being and the volley of axioms to describe what was to become of me. (It's not that they have dried up now, but reduced considerably)
5) The monotonus daily study hours. I was never a poor player in that game of academics, fared well in the exams. But somehow the idea of being a nerd irked me. On the contrary, my mom wanted me to be one- a methodical, regular, bonafide student.
6) Having to wake up in the morning even if it was a Saturday or a Sunday. This discipline thing never teethed into my system, sadly.
7) The stringent rule to stay miles away from the kitchen as I was a contant menace to the gas oven. I was keen on experimenting with the gas lighter, specially the way it sparks off to produce a flint of fire and lights the gas.
So these were excerpts of a journey through my mind-scapes, a journey that I will cherish to take over and over again. Now the biggie thing. I tag Rai, Priyankari, Deep, Ajay, Dhaval, Hazel dream, jiby(if he is not already tagged), Sandesh (when he chooses to blog again), Pradip and all those who drops by to read this and haven't been tagged. So folks muzzle up and give it a go...
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