Time machine. Those were the days…
Whenever people heard an annoying cycle of a repeated clicks followed by the screeching sound of a cycle pedal on a sunny afternoon, they use to conclude it to be one of us – the kids – on our street. Cycling on a lazy afternoon had its own fun. Our only sense of purpose was to reach our destination. We had no money or job or even a XBox for that matter. We never played on a gadget and we certainly did not know the existence of board games. We had Chess boards but Chess was never considered an interesting game not because we sucked it, but because our parents repeatedly adviced us to play chess. Play chess, you will be intelligent some day, probably; play chess, your brain will function better; I don’t know a single who kid who plays a game to become intelligent. It is so darn lame! Even though we are no longer kids, we play games because it’s our birth right. We don’t need a purpose and we certainly don’t need an advice.
I had a metallic blue Hercules MTB 2000 Bicycle which costed about 2 grands during those days. I use to ride it to my school, tutions, friends place, relatives place, joy rides, everywhere. I always preferred riding it from afternoon 3 till night 8 but was not limited to it. While the breeze, beautiful girls, nice cool temperature were my top priority ride it in the evening, afternoon rides were mainly to explore the city. The city I lived in was just about as big as 3-4Kms radius and I explored it for a good 10 years of my life. Now, that explains my persistent memory loss! Also, let me explain you the intricate details of my exploration even with the risk of sounding desperate. Exploring an area was not just about exploring lanes and street names, it was about understanding the architecture of different buildings, peeping through the windows of those buildings while riding to see if I can spot a babe, noting down different eateries in different areas and lastly, hmmm, mental peace. Yes, mental peace, it never felt so good to royally waste time in my life as it did exploring. No more comments on that.
Apart from all that, I use to spend a lot of evening time watching birds (real flying birds, no hidden meaning) inspired by that Bird guy, Salim Ali. I thought I could be an ornitholigist or something. After sometime, it didn’t interest me so much and I started to realise that birds were really really dumb and understanding them will take up a lot my play time. I started to feel that I can train some 50 dogs or an elephant within that time of understanding one bird.
After that, when I was in 6th grade my mom suggested me to join Karate classes in children’s club. This was one of those summer camp event. If you dont know what that is, you are better off without knowing about it. Summer camps are those events specifically well crafted by cheap greedy unsuccessful small organisations to burn your parents money, while wasting your time. Talk of productivity! The name of this particular club did not represent the activities club at all. This club made us work harder than our schools and spent a lot of time talking spiritual stuff. As far as Karate, they use to make us run so much before we start exercising for it. Only after which our real Karate classes use to start where we have to roar and punch. Their motive, `Harder you roar, better you punch`, didn’t make sense to me at all. I roared and roared like a hungry old lion trapped in a cave in an african jungle and I am still to this day, as weak as a cat loitering around the restaurant named ”African Jungle” in streets of Bangalore.
For a really long time in my life, painting was a special talent of mine. I never painted portraits or used water/oil paints but I was better than the most in pencil sketching. My area of expertise was to write my name, Typography is the jazzy word for it. I did that. I did write caricatures of some people though. So in 7th grade summer holidays I was put back in the prison, the summer camp. I spent this time drawing fruits, flowers and stuff. Nope! Didn’t interest me but it wasn’t dissapointing. This time, Children’s club distributed us aasey milk chocolate candies. It was from nutrine company and it literally costed 0.25 rupees (0.5 cents). This currency denomination itself is no more in circulation in India. But this was good enough to keep me motivated.
All in all, I have tried a lot of different things in my childhood. It was fun, ecastatic and made my day everyday. I use to spend about 4-5 hours every week collecting chocolate wrappers on streets and waste dumps to redeem some cool Cricket cards, WWE cards, teeth bunny (from nutrine for 25 Aasey chocolate wrappers), bunny masks (50 wrappers) and more. I will write more about these, my Yoga classes and my theft experiences (I was a thief and not a victim!) some other time. The End! Shubham! Thanks for wasting your time reading my blog titled waste of time! [I renamed the article to Time machine, so thanks anyways! ]
