Friends and well-wishers, hearty welcome and a big salute to each one of you for all your achievements and accomplishments.
A couple of days before, I was going through my regular morning walks in our neighborhood and was caught by a wonderful invigorating vision of my life that has changed and energized my days to date and is sure to catch up rest of my life. Came across a five or six year old Kid walking along, tightly grasping her grandfather’s hands who should be in his 70s. For a minute I could not make out as to whether the kid is holding tightly her grandfather’s hands or is it the other way, since both of them are at far ends of their life and when it comes to dependency both of them are in need of a hand to hold. What a sight, it took my days and forced me to share my views with all of you. One way it has forced me to rewind as well as fast forward in life since most of us fall in between these two generations.
Happy to release this piece of write up, around 14th November being Children’s day and most of us might travel back and would like to live a day or a moment in their childhood days. That’s a natural way of rejoicing in one’s life which comes at no cost. In fact when we come across 14th November each year, it is natural to revisit the Child in us.
An MIT Study recently revealed that Human Brain has in-built storage areas to store our memories, esp. long term or explicit memory or events happened to us in our childhood stored in Hippocampus, located in the brain’s temporal lobe, where episodic memories are formed and indexed for later access, even after four or five decades.
Before we go further, I did make a short survey among my close associates as to
1) How far you consider your child hood days as precious and
2) Is it worth to travel back and live our child hood for a short while.
The response was encouraging and very much in the affirmative as almost 90% of my respondents consider their childhood as precious and worth reliving.
With that, I would like to traverse decades backwards and let us see what we had and we might be missing:
“Childhood is like being drunk. Everyone remembers what you did, except you.”
Seed of friendship: Irrespective of our gender, each one of us would have had a neighboring child of our age who will stand by us in all our musings, quarrels and atrocities next to our parents and siblings. At that tender age we sow the seed of friendship that lasts for decades, to have a hold even after the absence of our parents.
In house Class Room Learnings: Our Children are far away from the in house learning environment what we have witnessed, which in spite of being well advanced in terms of grasping and learning potential and academic oriented, but definitely lack the technique and applications that we had put in with limited resources that lasts a life time and in most cases cannot be overtaken by the technological advancements.
Walk and make friends: Walk to the school and pick up friends from their homes on the way, chat fearlessly, egoless and considerate to one another. Parents did not had any fear of their wards getting kidnapped etc. Children had unconditional freedom to move around and were taken care by older siblings. Kids could easily open caps and bottles as they weren’t child safe and need not wear seat belts.
“We didn’t realize we are making memories, we just knew we were having Fun.”
In fact the Childhood days of the 1960s were considered “Age of Innocence”
Joy of Reading and Writing: With the advent of email in the late sixties and early seventies, posts and telegraph services took a back seat and went into oblivion in the next decade and today in history. Am sure most of you would like to relive the joy of writing letters to our friends and relatives, walk down to the P & T Counters to have it stamped and with that to learn the process and route that our letter will take to reach our loved ones. Subsequently email was overtaken by WhatsApp where we have ended up with expressing in a single smiley or an emoji and nothing beyond. Definitely we are the treasured lot.
Show of Strength and Physical Fitness: We were enthused with PT Class at school and to be with friends at weekends to be engaged in varied Physical activities and Sports. Anything on our way from the school bag, to writing pads, to roadside trash can or even a chair comes to our rescue to serve as stumps and a bunch of unused papers as our ball in our own game of cricket. With all these uninterrupted physical activities we used to have peaceful sleep at night and enjoyed our food. How can we forget the joy of our daily bathing in our own backyard by manually drawing water from the well, as also washing clothes manually? What a matchless life it was and enjoyable it used to be, which has been taken over by indoor digital games that we see the current generation children are rejoicing differently at the cost of their mental health.
“Childhood is not a race to see how quickly a child can read, write and count. Childhood is a small window of time to learn and develop at the pace which is right for each individual child.”
Television as source of entertainment: Television introduced to us in the early 60s had a significant impact on our life. After Dinner, families gathered around the TV, and living rooms became family Theaters. Families of the 1960s were the first to watch the world’s cultural events and political dramas unfold in real-time every evening on the family television. We enjoyed so much of fun and frolic with a long list of children’s movies or cartoons like Charlie Chaplin, Tom & Jerry, 101 Dalmatians, Alice in wonderland, Sound of Music, to name a few.
“Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, and textures of carpets” alain de botton
Memories of our Train Journies in the 60s and 70s will definitely takes us to another world..
Visits to place of worship: We grew up in a household with lot of religious value and cultural attachments. We had a carefree attitude while in a place of worship and under total innocence stood there with folded hands as instructed by our elders, to seek and pray for well-being without actually knowing what it means.
Value of Family Life: Freedom and Change were the anthems of the 60s. It is not that family lost its importance, but this decade families became less structured, family ties loosened, parents became more permissive, children became more independent and self-reliant, and family life became more colorful and complex.
“A lot of my childhood memories involve walking home in floods of tears. At that age feeling unpopular is difficult to handle” Rachel Stevens
In contrast, todays’ children and adolescents have much less free, unstructured, unsupervised time than their predecessors did. Parents are putting their kids much more into adult-structured, adult-supervised activities than they did in the past. The geographical range of childhood and youth has contracted over time.
“Every Child is like a flower and no two flowers can be compared”
We have mixed reactions from today’s parents or adults as summed up here, when confronted with a question of how they compare life of their children with their own childhood:
- The modern child spends huge amounts of time in front of a TV, or a Computer or an iPad or iPhone being passive and frankly producing very little. With that they have very little face to face communication.
- We can hardly come across brothers and sisters play much together these days and learn the nuances of taking care of their younger brothers and sisters.
- Same time Children nowadays have a great many more opportunities to literally see the world than it was in the 20th century. Digital media comes handy for todays’ children to learn about different countries and cultures from the comfort of their homes.
- Also today’s children, lack a connection with Nature which needs to be addressed.
It gives me immense pleasure, as I bid adieu, to have kindled the child in each one of you, while we join together to make the world of today’s children heavenly, by giving them the best in us. SEE YOU.
Catch and Cater 
Nice post as usual, became a regular reader I should say.
Happy to see your post, nicely written.
It took me to my childhood days, enjoyed and cherished the amount of physical activity we used to have then.
Now its more of on-screen time. Missing them :).
Thanks for rekindling the memories.
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Perfect input on the expected lines as I am sure that this post will surely take readers back to their chikdhood days.Thanks for your comments and for following my posts.
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