What games did you play as a child?
It's a long story, but here's a bit of it from me. I grew up shifting from place to place, and made and refined, with a labour and diligence I now find incredible, my own games. We stayed for a year in a British-type sarkaari bungalow in the middle of a barren nowhere of oil tanks. That's where it started. I played cricket with the watchman of course but got bored when he carted me all over the garden. It was also time to kick the football in the corridors, playing for England or playing for Italy at the whims of a fun-seeking mind. And I burnt paper planes: I made hundreds and hundreds of them, scribbled Noyta CCCP and USAF and I hit them with each other as they flew. If you bang into a plane, you've shot it down. Then you dutifully kneel on the floor, while mother is asleep in her bedroom, and you set it on fire. Flames slide form the slide, curling the metal to crumbling black. I fought entire wars like this: what hard work! Russia always won; I found the country's name stylish, with some picture of golden haired, handsome people with fragrant bodies and elegant palaces.
Then tennis started, with a badminton racket and a table tennis ball, against the verandah's wall. Stefan Edberg vs Boris Becker. You hit for one, then for the other. The anguish and elation are real. You record every point in a notebook's last pages. Football tournaments, tennis tournaments, wars. Then cricket came, to stay for life. Sunil Gavaskar walks in, swinging his bat, skipping. I'm Sunil Gavaskar and the point is to get out a few times so that Kapil Dev can come in and belt the glorious sixes. And on getting out I would kneel down on the floor, holding my forehead in despair. Then the next batsman would come in, swinging his bat, skipping. Actually this game, in various forms, has been played all my life. My hero for the last ten years has been Dravid, not for his runs or consistency but the grace he brings to a game commoditised by power-hitting and clinical team-drills. So even now, with a tennis ball and a light bat, I practice against a wall with a jagged rubber carpet on the good length spot, defending and prodding amongst an imaginary close-in field and a slip cordon waiting like devotees for the day's prasad at big man's puja.
No more detailed scores in my notebooks of course. So. How much of what we are is shaped by the games we make for ourselves as we grow up?
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Wow! I never realized that there were others like me who played such crazy games in their childhood :)
I have to admit though that I never fought wars. My solitary games were restricted to tennis and cricket. For tennis, I made do with just a TT ball and my hand as the racket. And, instead of hitting against the wall, I emulated both players by running across the court (which was basically just 10x5 mosaic tiles in dimension!) and hitting the ball back to the other side. And, for cricket, I only bowled with the wall (not Dravid, but an actual wall :)) being the batsman.
BTW, I also played out entire cricket tournaments with board cricket - the one in which you score as many runs as what shows up on the dice and some squares are marked as dismissals. I even tried my hand at basketball, though all that I did was shoot a TT ball with the basket being the pelmet that holds the curtain.
Anyway, great to have all those memories revived :)
Ah, btw, regarding your question as to how these games in our childhood affect us. Atleast in my case, because I just used to bowl against the wall, my batting is absolutely pathetic even now!
Ahhh... the strange mix of elation and disappointment when you realise you weren't alone in those crazy excursions into World Cup Soccer and Wimbledon in your childhood :)
I never burnt airplanes though... My wars were with toy-cowboy gangs fighting each other in rice-mound terrains :)
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