Childhood...

Can I please have my Childhood back!

Dr. Yashesh Anantani

I am pretty sure most of us in grihasthashram, in our old age today, remember fondly, desire or even yearn for our childhood to return – turn the clock backwards like in those Hollywood films. How I wish I could do that!

What is it that makes the nostalgia so precious, so powerful? Could it be the circumstances around the present day children, I wonder – you know, overindulging them materially and financially, availability of everything a child desires for, soft-on-discipline parentage, the terrible schooling, rote education that suppresses development of facultative and cognitive skills, lack of spatial development, of being bright without the brilliance of enabling environment for personality development…the list could be endless. In a sense, any comparison probably makes us feel as being underprivileged during our upbringing way back in 1950s.

Did I say ‘underprivileged’? Well, maybe, maybe not. It could be a perception borne out of sheer envy. However, here is a rather improbable thought – maybe we as children were BETTER privileged in that techno-less era!! Shall we find out how? Let me take you traveling back in time ... to my childhood in Africa! 

Revisiting Childhood Dar-es-Salaam, 2010 (all photos)

British East Africa; Dar-es-Salaam, to be precise, the Capital city of (then) Tanganyika! That by itself was the first and foremost privilege, and that of learning from the British, not only governance, management and discipline but also the education system. We had co-education up to Grade VI in primary school. We had Indian teachers, characters and personalities that alas, have been lost in time and history, never ever replicated in modern day education. The young impressionable minds, when exposed to the aura of great teachers, can get turned on towards excellence! Talking of impressions, the girls in my class were cute. But conservatism ruled the Indian families then and being brought up with strict discipline, we remained innocent – and ignorant.

The British administration was very clever! Just as we sensed having inklings of budding romance in primary school, the address and the teachers changed in the secondary school! The girls went separately to a neighbouring school, with its fencing resembling wartime PoW camp! We had huge open grounds then and were told in no uncertain terms that we were not to go towards the girls’ school fencing. That was the end of the very concept of a childhood romance! And if there was any proof of the ‘divide & rule’ politics of the British killjoys, this was it!! So praise some brave souls I know who had the courage to cross the line…sorry, fence!!

Anyway, this also meant we got quality time for studies in the secondary school. Always numbering 30 in a class, some of us have been canned between the fingers by none other than the Principal himself for wrong-doings. Not understanding anything akin to mathematics was my genetic disorder! I remember standing on the bench with a rather sheepish look for 45 minutes for not answering a simple (must have been very difficult) question about Book-keeping coming from a handsome Maharashtrian teacher; it is a different matter that the same married gentleman was also a subject of our very adult gossip during many a recess. That was in 1957 in Grade VII.

The Cambridge system of education was such that an average student like me could be motivated and be promoted to Grade X-Royal that was made up of a select few who would then go straight to Grade XII, skipping one year in the process. I finally got First Class in my Cambridge School Certificate exams in December, 1963, getting super-distinction in English and Gujarati languages and distinction in Science. Oral English was an optional subject that I passed too. The system also allowed me to exit the exam hall giving back a blank History paper – this, for the subject that I hated most, could be pre-planned. There was no such thing as ‘objective’ questions! The question papers tested skills and even innovative bent of mind.

After school-hours, it was a quick homework time. The old, valve-based radio with a tuner was used rarely by the family. It would be either AIR-Overseas news, BBC news or a half-hour of Hindi film songs on the local broadcasting station. We also had His Master’s Voice Gramophone that today fetches a hefty sum in the antique market. Television was unheard of then. But we had some really exquisite movie theaters and I cannot forget the wide-eyed thrill I experienced every time the beautiful curtain rose upwards in folds, slowly and majestically; the technology never failed to amaze the child in me.

Seeing movies was a family affair, and the long interval, a social event. Despite strict discipline at home including table manners and eating styles, and in spite of the fact that I was the sixth and final child with a 14-year gap between me and the previous male, the elders have always taken me along to see almost all the Hindi and English classics, dance ballets and concerts (Gopi Krishna, Sitara Devi, Uday & Amala Shanker, Asha Parekh and Jyutika Roy to name a few). Sunday evenings would mean walking down to the white sand beaches with friends, anxiously looking out for girls because for once, they would not be in that boring uniform. Did they look pretty!!

While on films, how can I ever forget the music in Hindi classics! The lyrics, the composition, the orchestra arrangement and accordingly, the acting, in that order, were all borne out of time consuming labour of love in trying to match with the film script and the ethos therein. As a result, not only could we immediately memorize the songs, even school children and youngsters today actually sing those songs. Also, the orchestra was full of violins, a harmonium, an accordion and an occasional mouth organ - nothing artificially electronic. In fact many children those days played mouth organs (and tysocoters) as hobby. As we celebrate 100 years of Indian cinema today, those sound tracks with lilting melodies, mellifluous voices and the chocolate heroes and make-up-less-yet-beautiful heroines are being terribly missed.

Coming back to my memory track, a study of religious scriptures at the pathshala was compulsory for me, daily 4-5pm. The vyayamshala was next door, 5-6pm; unlike modern gyms, there was no fancy equipment. It was no-tech ‘aerobics’, a term unheard of those days. Again, latecomers were punished by going round the campus with heavy magdals (hand-held teak wood weights for body building) on both the shoulders – one possible reason why I remained stunted at 4ft in height till age seventeen! We always volunteered for event management at the temples or for our community organizations for various festivals. I can proudly say that I played the Indian percussion drum set, nobat, fluently for 45 minutes at the temple every Monday of the auspicious shravan month, every year.

Apart from cricket, we had our own terrific innovations of street games that required no sports gear. Why, the girls/boys even played ‘housie’ (ghar-ghar); we will actually engineer a small hut in the backyard and role-play husband, wife, brother, sister, even father, and bring in pre-cooked food to be served by the ‘wife’! Pure home science education if nothing else! 

Outings to Uluguru mountains, Ruvu river always in spate, and safaris to Mikumi game reserve and Moshi-Arusha region in our family cars were frequent. The safaris to Serengeti National Park stand out in memory - and so also swimming at the nearby beaches almost every other day. The occasional rail travel was beautiful. 

The best moments however were on board the big white ships in cabin class, twelve days of sheer magic, each way to and from Bombay, each year - and that too via the quaint towns of Zanzibar Island, Mombasa in Kenya and the most exotic of all, the Seychelles islands. Approaching this tropical coral archipelago, one could see from the ship deck, the refractively raised floor of a crystal-clear blue ocean with big, colourful marine fish of all varieties, sizes and shapes. We did fly occasionally in those four-engine Comets but that meant 24 hrs of flying time plus two changes of flights.

One thing I am not sure about is whether I had ever had ‘parental guidance’ the way modern counsellors mean (and make business out of it). The very sight of father’s imposing, strict  personality, the fear of a ringing slap or that of a flying steel saucer coming straight at you if entering home after 7pm sharp – may be these are attributes that when assimilated together, can be loosely paraphrased as ‘parental guidance’! Whatever it was, it worked…very effectively! 

And so, once upon a time, life was a song. We, girls and boys together, grew up to be nice, simplistic, eco-friendly children with a growth potential that was built out of unintended character building activities, accepted disciplined approach to life, and motivated desire for culture, innovation and adventure. It was a fancy-free age, absolutely pure and divine. We never had toys or computers to ‘develop our mind’. Yet, we were exposed to an atmosphere and circumstances that somehow made us what we are today. Today, we have also undergone change in attitudes to keep pace with first, modernization and then, globalization, and with the ever-evolving gen-next. It is an extremely fast, hurtling process of evolution that just cannot be stopped. In contrast, ours was a laid back era with no peer pressures; and yet, that was the childhood when there really was no free time! Instead, what we had was quality time, something that is possibly being denied to a child in today’s hectic world. It could be a matter of opinion but perhaps, this very spatial dimension to character engineering is missing today, a dimension that we as children were so privileged to experience.

So here is an ode to our childhood - a cuddly sweet little package wrapped with the rainbow hues of unintended character-building attributes; acceptance of discipline as a way of life; of education and learning in totality; of innocence, of everlasting bonds of genuine love and of sustainable friendships so created. Oh! How sorely I miss it! Unfortunately, the childhood era of yours and mine just cannot be brought back. It can only be played out, and replayed, with deliberate regularity in our psyche - with a reminiscent smile; with joy and with gratitude for all the privileges we got…gratitude to that intangible, inexplicable entity – Destiny!