Visual by: Pallab Neog
As we move towards a new tomorrow, the more we get surrounded by digital technology in each and every spectrum of life. From the morning alarm in our phones to social media to our day-to-day life, we are more enclosed inside the ‘digital shell’ of technology than ever before.
So readers, why don’t we take a look and relish the good old days, before technology took over when the biggest concern was to choose the colour of the crayon. Oh, those decisions! How innocent were we? And how simple was life? Playing in the mud and watching our favourite cartoon shows on TV, and cursing the homework. That pretty much summed up the best days of our life.
With so much tech around us, it’s easy to forget how fun traditional old school games were. How about we get back in time and remember the games we played and take a trip down memory lane and get immersed into Nostalgia.
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Hide-and-Seek
Hide-and-seek, one of the most popular games, where one player closes his or her eyes for a brief period (often counting to 100) while the other players hide.
The seeker then opens his eyes and tries to find the hiders; the first one found in the next seeker, and the last is the winner of the round. In one of many forms of the game, the hiders try to run back to “home base” while the seeker is away looking for them; if all of the hiders return safely, the seeker repeats as a seeker in the next round.
Pakdam Pakdai or Tag
The thrill of Pakdam Pakdai is beyond explanation. Players (two or more) decide who is going to be “it”, often using a counting-out game such as eeny, meeny, miny, moe.
The player selected to be “it” then chases the others, attempting to “tag” one of them (by touching them with a hand) as the others try to avoid being tagged. A tag makes the tagged player “it”.
Carrom
Carrom- a game still popular in many regions among all age groups. Carrom is played using small disks of wood or plastic. These pieces, aside from the special queen, may also be known as seeds, coins, pawns (as in chess), or pucks. They are designed to slide when struck and are made with a smooth surface that slides easily when laid flat on the board.
They are struck by a Striker of a standard specification which is larger and heavier. Carrom follows similar “strike and pocket” games, like pool, with its use of rebounds, angles, and obstruction of opponent’s carrom pieces.
A carrom set contains 19 pieces (striker not included) in three distinct colours: one for each player, and another for the queen. The usual colours are white (or unstained) and black for the players and red for the queen.
Kite flying
Though a dangerous game, it had its own share of thrill and excitement The feeling of competitiveness it evoked was on another level altogether (kind of like the India-Pakistan match for the adults) and the satisfaction you got when you ‘looted’ someone else’s kite was a triumph one could brag about for days.
Kite Flying was back in popularity during the Lockdown last year as people were enclosed in their homes and sorted to kites to pass the time.
Rock-Paper-Scissors
A hand game usually played between two people, in which each player simultaneously forms one of three shapes with an outstretched hand. These shapes are “rock” (a closed fist), “paper” (a flat hand), and “scissors” (a fist with the index finger and middle finger extended, forming a V). “Scissors” is identical to the two-fingered V sign (also indicating “victory” or “peace”) except that it is pointed horizontally instead of being held upright in the air.
A player who decides to play rock will beat another player who has chosen scissors (“rock crushes scissors” or sometimes “blunts scissors”[4]), but will lose to one who has played paper (“paper covers rock”); a play of paper will lose to a play of scissors (“scissors cuts paper”). If both players choose the same shape, the game is tied and is usually immediately replayed to break the tie.
These are my picks of five childhood games and I’m sure I must have missed plenty of your favorite ones. So why not use this opportunity to relinquish and look back at all those memories you made with your friends and family.
