Technology and a change in the generations are making people live in a capsule life. If we rewind our lives 20 - 25 years back, children those days were most often seen playing in grounds and not in their homes unlike these days. The games played were more physical than mental or virtual which are been played these days.Even parents encouraged their kids to play with their friends in their house or allow their kids to visit their friends house in the vicinity.
I think as a kid I remember, I used to visit so many of my friends house to play or to study and it was so much fun. The evenings in our days were so full of physical activities as we used to play games like badminton, Lagori ( a popular game in Maharshtra), Cricket, Bhokancha ( hide n seek), Daba Aispais ( very popular game in Maharashtra), Gotya ( Marbles), Football, flying Kites and many more.
Check with todays kids whether they know or have heard of such games. Forget about outdoor games, even during our Super summer vacations, we used to play so many indoor games and computer was far far away from us. We used to hear it only as an intelligent and expensive machine which were being explored by Banks and Railways.
Snakes and ladders, Sharing interesting ghost stories, Card games like Challenge, Jhabbu, Not at home, Gulam chor, Badaam Saat and god knows how many more, were played almost every afternoon at some friends house or were played when we were sent to some cousin's place to spend the vacation for a couple of weeks.
Todays kids are pampered like anything and some parents are afraid to send children to their friends house as they fear the kids can spoil each other by playing computers or watching unwanted programmes on Television. In fact, unlike the good old days, parents do not leave their children independant even during the summer vacation. Staying away from the kids for more than a week is like big task or punishment on them. More than the kids, we, as working parents miss our children and get them back in our family capsules.
I used to stay at my cousins place for weeks together and used to enjoy the time even if i used to miss my home.Those days even communication was never easy. Telephones and Televisions were also luxury. Today, we have every means of communication yet we cant leave our children for more than a week.
Speaking about Televisions, I remember, Sunday was such a special day for everyone. Epic serials like Mahabharat, Ramayan were a big hit and they were screened only for one hour every sundays. Our parents use to give extra background knowledge on every characters of these epics and that was making it more interesting. There used to be just one channel, the main channel no.1 ( Doordarshan) and for the second channel, one had to invest some good money to buy the 14 spoke Antennae to get a clear reception. It was also termed as luxury.
Things changed after the 2nd channel got introduced. The poor fellows who could not afford the extra investment did some R&D with their Antennaes and occasionally they used to adjust the angles to catch the reception free ;)
The 2nd channel got phased out and Cable TV got introduced and so on.... Today you can watch hundreds of Channels giving every wanted and unwanted information a kid should have.
My kid, 6 years old, comes out one day from the school premises and tells his mother about a co-student ( girl) who was standing few feets away from him that She is in love with him :(( Stunned, my wife asked him why he feels that way for which he says that she is constantly looking at him and smiles whenever he sees her.
Jokes apart, the influence of technology is changing the generations faster than normal. Whether it is right or wrong, we have to sometimes dig our childhood days and learn on things that our parents did to us. Iam not concluding my blog at this moment as in this fast life, me and my wife, as a parent are struggling and learning many new things on parenting. Every day is a new day for us and a new challenge which iam sure many parents of my age might be facing. The blog is open for all those parents in case, you also want to comment on things that we miss now or on things that we can do. Comments are always welcome!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment