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November 26, 2006
Games kids play
This is in today's Mumbai Mirror.
Bouncing in the Jumping Jack/Moonwalker – Rs 10. Getting tattoos painted – Rs. 25. Swinging wildly on free swings – Priceless.
Young children are really funny. You can get them expensive toys, gift them Xboxes or PSPs or fancy, robot-like, multi-functional dolls, and yet they will often play for hours with just simple “vati-chamchis” or be happy kicking a cheap ball around. As happened this weekend, when we went to my daughter’s school, J B Vachha, which is in Five Gardens, for a fun-n-fair, which was interestingly called “Food Fiesta 2006”.
We first spent some time playing small table games, which were run by volunteers and students – small tests of skills involving throwing rings over soap bars and chocolates, or holding a wet brick with two fingers for a minute as well as games of chance, where you had to snare a hidden potato in a bowl of sand using fondue-like sticks (which the kids loved since they had just had their first taste of fondue a week ago), and black-jack like card-games. They eventually won three games’ coupons, which got them one small prize, and they promptly started fighting over this single item.
The Jumping Jack/Moonwalker has to be among the top-ten toy inventions ever. However agitated or uncontrollable the kids might be, whatever crazy mood they may be in, one look at these monstrosities and everything dissipates in the anticipation of being able to jump up and down with abandon. As a kid, I never had a chance to go into one of these (I am sure they didn’t exist) and as much as I would like to experience them, I know that at this age, no one is going to let me. After a little shoving and pushing (small kids really have no concept of queues), they managed to get their three-minutes tryst with the overblown balloon and had a blast.
We then made our way slowly from one end of the fair to the other, past stalls selling everything from clothes to glass baubles to fortune cookies. I actually bought two fortune cookies, trying to explain the whole concept to the kids. They loved the act of breaking a cookie, finding a piece of paper within, and then eating the cookie, but the fortunes were completely wasted on them. The tattoo-girl was also a great hit, but within minutes of getting them done, the tattoos were smudged by the clothes and bodies of the ever-increasing crowd.
And then there was food… frankies, chaats, pani-puris, kababs, corn, chicken-rolls, bhel, etc..., including Sabina with her gorgeous cakes and a divine banana tart.
We were having a great time, when we reached the end of the concourse. We were wondering what to do, when my daughter pointed out to the swings and slides, which are permanent fixtures in the school-ground, behind the cloth boundary of the Fiesta, which we promptly went past. The kids have finally learnt to swing on their own, without the need of an adult push (which was a pleasant surprise to me) and they kept swinging, as high as possible, competing with each other, sometimes in synchrony, sometimes off-sync, for a good 10 odd minutes, until I had to physically stop the swings to make them get off.
After we reached home, during the post-mortem, I asked them what they had liked the best…was it the games, the Jumping Jack/Moonwalker, the tattoos, the balloons (all of which had cost money), and without hesitation came the answer…the swings! (which had been totally free). Go figure!
Posted by bhavinj at 12:54 PM | Comments (0)
November 08, 2006
Bottlenecks to Progress
This appeared in today's Mumbai Mirror.
As Matunga becomes more and more crowded, with the insane increase in high-rises and cars, traffic is getting to be completely chaotic, with an exponential increase in travel times.
To understand this, let’s see how many bottlenecks now affect a simple route…say from Matunga gymkhana to the area behind Aurora theatre.Warning: Unless you are a hard-core greater Matungaiite, you might want just want to skip directly to the last paragraph.
Outside the Gymkhana, you can either take a right or a left.
If you turn left, the first bottleneck is at Matunga Market, which of course, is expected as always. Then, a little ahead, comes the new bottleneck, at the Post Office junction, due to the traffic coming from the Bhaudaji road extension. Past this, you then get stuck getting onto the Circle, where you often have no choice but to wait until the Amar Mahal signal turns red, to be able to ease into the consequent reduced flow of vehicles. Then comes the right turn on the Circle itself at the Anand Bhuvan signal, after which you have to quickly take a left turn onto the small Circle-to-Khalsa road. Sometimes, if the traffic is backed-up at the Adenwalla road signal, this can take a good 1-2 minutes. Once on this small road, idiots trying to go to the Natural ice-cream parlor can create another bottleneck, on your way to Rasna Panjab, where you then have to take a left.
Once here, the rest of the road is common even for the route described below.
If you turn right from the Gymkhana, you take a left at Ruia college upto to the main-road signal, where there is usually a wait of upto 7-8 cars, which can sometimes make you miss one turn. Past the signal, you have two choices. You can take a left at Adenwalla road and then drive past the no-entry VJTI right turn and take a right into the small lane, just before the Circle, to reach the Circle-to-Khalsa road. But since this small one-car-at-a-time lane is not a one-way street, if there is a car coming from the opposite side, you can get stuck for quite some time trying to negotiate your way.
The other choice is to go all the way straight upto the St.Joseph’s circle and take a left, where there is often a gridlock. If you manage to get past this, you then immediately hit the Wadala East signal, where unlike in the past, all the cars now want to take a right turn (due to the crazy township development in Wadala East) which leaves very little space to go straight. Once this is negotiated, it is then a nice, quick drive to Rasna Panjab, as in the old days.
Past Rasna Punjab, irrespective of how you’ve reached there, you again get stuck because of the double-parked cars outside Café Coffee Day and Classic. Past these, you take a right and then a left and again get stuck at Sahakari Bhandar, due to all the cars trying to either park there or leave from this new “Walmart of Matunga”. Only then are we home!
Bottom line: The price of progress seems to be increased travel time. Till the last couple of years, we always used to discount the time it took to travel from anywhere to anywhere, within Matunga and Wadala, since it never took more than 5-7 minutes. Now, it can take upto 15-20 minutes! I guess, we’re no longer a village, and progress just doesn’t seem like such a great thing anymore!
Posted by bhavinj at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)
