Which thought strikes you first when you see children selling toys at the traffic signal? Is it ‘why are children selling playthings at an age when they should be playing?’ or ‘who are the children who will play with these toys?’
At its most elemental level, the toy has had an umbilical relationship with childhood. Battered or brand new, toys used to be considered essential to teaching us empathy, creative thinking and hand-eye coordination.
India’s toy history dates back to the Harappa and Mohenjodaro civilisations. Each region of the nation has its own genre of toys fashioned from materials as diverse as the pith of marsh reeds to unbaked clay, wood and leather.
Readers of a certain age would remember a time when getting a toy was a special experience, usually created by the celestial alignment of an affectionate relative who had brought a toy just in time for your birthday. It could be a chubby doll with blinking eyes and moveable arms and legs, or a die-cast Dinky Car from abroad that could become the potential protagonist of a thousand childhood adventures.
These would be, for a while, the special occupants of your toy chest (or cupboard), all-weather friends who could always guarantee a good time. Railway journeys during summer vacations invariably would swell up the number of treasures, especially when you got your hands on toys with small mechanical parts that moved when you manipulated their handles. The two tin roosters pecking for grain from a central plate was one such toy, often seen only in railway stations.
Vacations could introduce new variations of toys, especially for kids coming down south, to wooden kitchen utensils painted in glossy primary colours and neatly packed into a woven palm fibre basket. The stalls outside temples would be rich hunting grounds for toys – from miniature stainless steel vessel sets to baby rattles and walking aids for toddlers made of wood and fibre.
Reinvent or die
Does this all sound a bit in the past tense? That traditional toys can be seen more in government handicraft emporia and museums than at home, in the hands of their primary users, shows how much the idea of playing and what constitutes a plaything has evolved over the years.
Real-time board games that encourage group play and lateral thinking – chess, Ludo, Scrabble, Monopoly, and so on – have all had to reinvent themselves for the electronic generation. So it is possible for players to commune at a ‘board’ provided by the internet, even if they are sitting in different countries and time zones.
But those that haven’t adapted, are slowly dying out. For example, several versions of the mancala board games that use ‘count-and-capture’ gameplay are now falling by the wayside. If you are wondering what this is, just try and recollect when you last sat down with your friends for a boisterous session of ‘pallankuzhi’.
There was a time when the game, which had a marble or wooden board with 14 pits using tamarind seeds or small cowrie shells as counters, used to be an integral part of the southern Indian household.
School-going kids of the 1970s and ’80s would no doubt remember the days when winning the written word game ‘Name, Place, Animal, Thing’ was a definite marker of intellectual achievement.
Many games didn’t require much by way of equipment – anyone who has played kitti-pul/gilli-danda (pitch-peg), goli-gundu/kaancha (marbles) or guttey (five stones) would recall how soon matches could be set up and dismantled (in time for homework and tea). Very few games would be held up (as they can be now), due to a lack of battery cells or internet connectivity.
Techno takeover
As playgrounds became a casualty of the building boom, the act of playing started losing value as well. Parents, worried about their children’s safety, preferred to buy toys and games that would make the user more home-bound.
Technology-dependent playthings, from the egg-shaped Tamagotchi, a handheld digital pet with the capability to ‘die’ if the owner neglected it, to computer role-playing games captured nearly every child’s toy chest in the new millennium.
Some of these New Age games are made with grown-ups in mind, but are invariably played by young and old alike. Whether players can distinguish between the artificial yet immersive extreme violence promoted by games like Grand Theft Auto and real life, remains debatable.
Internet Gaming Disorder, or compulsive videogame playing, is being studied by the American Psychiatric Association since 2013.
Postural and eyesight problems caused by long hours spent gaming are also becoming a common complaint. And the reduction of physical activity has become one of the many contributors to childhood obesity.
Old-style toys still flourish, but, like Barbie or even the beloved Lego building bricks, only when they have a parallel life in a television show or a movie. There is no scope for children to imagine their own stories for their toys anymore.
Merchandising link-ups have made toys a sub-set of the aggressive marketing culture of the entertainment industry.
How many ‘Happy Meal’ deals from fast-food chains have been bought by parents simply to satisfy their children’s desire to own the toys being given as part of the promotion?
Among the top 15 toy choices for 2016 compiled by CNBC, the first three rely on sophisticated robotics.
Nearly every other plaything on the list is riding on the coattails of a film or TV show.
With such a rate of early player burnout and surplus production of tech-toys, will there come a time when hawkers will start selling them at our traffic signals?
Published - November 20, 2015 04:13 pm IST
