The Games People Play(ed)

 [Published in My Kolkata on 23rd June 2024.  Read Online.]

Oh the games people play now  /  Every night and every day now

Never meaning what they say now  /  Never saying what they mean

Inner Circle made that song memorable for me. After an exhausting brace of election months we know we’ve been a part of these games, often as spectators or pawns. But that’s political.  This piece is about the games that we played in our youth and how they have transformed over the years.

Facebook University informs me that for some 72 days which began a week or two ago, we are going to be treated to sports like never before - ICC World Cup, UEFA, Copa America, the Olympics - and for armchair sports persons this is good news!  Better news for TV channels and advertisers. In the good old days of 2-colour TV (Black and White) we preferred to be outside, missing the ads, lowering the TRPs and playing physical games. Or even indoors.

At a friend’s house the other night his 8-year old asked me, “Do you know how to play UNO?” A very innocent question, or so I thought. No sooner had I nodded than Ritika produced a pack of UNO cards and proceeded to hustle me to a well-earned loss. I thought about the predecessor to this game, played in the corridors of St Vincent’s Asansol where my brothers schooled. It was called Up the Ganga - same concept, leave the last man standing as winner, but played with an ordinary pack of dog-eared cards. Most of the new games played with fancier equipment today date back to very simple beginnings.

[Pic: Game of Lattu]

The craze for Beyblades has died down (hopefully). These kids can’t believe that we had tops (lattus) made of tooled wood, a “nail” sticking out at one end, and a “latthi” a string which had to be wound just right to put a spin on things. I remember that circle in which my top would be lying and all these vicious animals would line up to take aim so they could get their nails to put a dent in or gouge out a “gunj” in my top. And of course, then would follow the scramble to grab your top, wind it up and spin and hop it before everyone else.  There were guys who could do “short sparks” by spinning their tops directly into their hands. Since I always lost, I had to devise techniques to prevent my top from splitting down the middle. We used a metal thumb tack in the centre to prevent a well aimed nail from ending the game for us. There were a lot of other things that may have been actual words but for us they were part of the vocabulary like latthi katan and lathi milan. Our beyblade champs would never know the joy of banging the nail into the wood of the top using a nearby wall.

And long before Gully Cricket became ubiquitous in the streets of Kolkata, we had gulli danda - the gulli could be made out of anything, but was carefully shaped to a sausage tapered at both ends so that it could be hit with a stick and spun up to be hit for a six or a catch! No protective masks, gloves or pads - you ran the risk of being hit in the face at silly point or caught in the slips. And there were no teams - it was one person against the rest, in turn.

Similar to this game was “Rounders” - the name was later lent to the game played around a TT table. My dad was the proud owner of a softball bat.  One batter had to hit the rubber ball and run around the pitch while avoiding being tagged out. One “round” eventually got recognised as a home run in baseball. Everyone played against the batter - it became the signature game of the Scout troops!

Oh, for our lost youth.  Today’s lost youth play Beer Pong at pubs.  We played Ping Pong on the green benches at St Xavier’s. As soon as you could gobble down your lunch you contributed your tiffin box to create the ‘net’ in the middle of these large green tables. Then a simple ping pong ball would be enough to create a table tennis match, with textbook paddles. As we grew and went over to the other side (the College) the green benches assumed romantic significance and Ping Pong died.

On a childhood trip to Durgapur my cousins taught me the game of pittu or Seven Tiles. We had to search for 7 flatish stones which could be balanced till hit with a ball. Then one team had to prevent the tower from being built while the other had to try and rebuild it. High energy, some precursor to rugby tackles included, and one team would build the tower and win!  I don’t think they’ve created a sophisticated version of the game yet. Or even kabaddi though it has made it to World Game status.

As the evening sun went down, it was time for twilight games like “Relieve us”. Two teams - one hiding, the other searching. Captured individuals waited excitedly for one of the team to sneak up and run through the ‘jail’ shouting ”Relieve us” - then everyone just hightailed it out of there. I’m not sure of all the rules, but it did get violent at times! Mixed groups played a little more ladylike game called ‘Chains’.  I suspect getting to hold someone’s hand was in itself a motivation, but we enjoyed running around like missing links. 

All indoor games were gender agnostic.  These included all time favourites like chess, carrom, checkers and multiple games played with cards. Carrom has become everyone’s para club game, replete with low hanging lights, talcum powder and strikers of various weights and hues. Chess has achieved a more elite status with specialist teaching centres and grandmasters in the making all over the city and plenty of computer versions to play against. From Go Fish to Pairs to Rummy to Poker, all the card games have achieved some celebrity status once they went online. Now one gets regular reminders to take part in online Rummy contests.  And Ludo - that simple game of luck played with colourful counters - has now become an obsession online. 

One Christmas I got a Bagatelle set. What’s that? It’s the original pinball.  Some of us will remember flicking a ball-bearing up the trough on one end and watching it bounce around the nails till it fell into a place which had a score attached. We were Pinball Wizards before it reached Las Vegas! And now, this too can be played on a mobile phone. The Covid Pandemic spawned a plethora of remote group games where everyone could login and play against each other from the comfort of the couch. That could merit another treatise.  I still maintain that a good game of marbles in the mud beats Marble Madness and its variants online!

For now, there’s nothing to beat the feeling summed up by the song Let's Go Fly a Kite from Mary Poppins.

“With your feet on the ground you're a bird in flight

With your fist holding tight, to the string of your kite!”