Chasing Childhood

Blast... I don’t know what it is about my Delhi visits! I have travelled to many places that are way more interesting, but every time I am in this city, I start itching to talk about the place - all the time wondering why, WHY this unholy fascination for the land of unholy goings-on!

Dil-li da Maamla hai

The first day of my week-long holiday, I had absolutely no intention of doing anything useful - or anything not-so-useful, for that matter. The Delhi heat and dust had started to get to me already, and all I really wanted to do was to compete with the bedspread on my Ma’s bed. I daresay I would have won, if it was not for the obscene amounts of time that Ananya, my 12-year old, was spending in front of the TV or laptop. As I watched her soak in some puerile stuff on SAB TV, her nose barely nanometres from the screen, I felt she was in serious danger of disappearing into the set, a la Mike Teavee in the Chocolate Factory - unless I did something drastic.

So I decided to concede defeat (albeit, temporarily) to the bedspread, and brave the scorching late afternoon heat of a Delhi summer to go all the way to  Shankar’s International Dolls’ museum at ITO, and top that up by traipsing down memory lane in Connaught Place. Well, to say that the museum was a tad disappointing would be an understatement. I actually recognized the faces of many of the dolls from visits during my childhood (due to technical difficulties, I will not go into exactly how long ago that was). But yes, that time they had seemed bright and alive, while now they appeared drab and desolate. That's understandable, naturally, but sprucing them up occasionally would not harm - honestly, some of them looked like the last cleaning and dusting they had seen was when they had been handed over to the museum personally by Shahjahan, or someone thereabouts...

Luckily, Ananya has a thing for dolls - of any kind, and some of the displays were rather exotic... but MOST importantly, the place was air-conditioned! So it was not an hour spent too badly at all!

Next stop – Connaught Place and Janpath.

I don’t have the foggiest why I start getting this warm glow over me when I am in this place. I don’t know why I should feel so tickled when I see the renovated Plaza theatre... I have no clue why it gives me a kick to find that ‘Prominent Tailors’, the tailor shop I used to frequent in my teens, still exists (for those of you born after 1980 - believe it or not, there actually was a time when a girl had to get her skirts and trousers stitched!) And I start doubting my own sanity when I find I still enjoy a soda and mutton chop at Nirula’s (so what if they were our favourite during the courting days – the current establishment is more washed up than Amisha Patel.)

But the best part of the day was the walk through Janpath... indulging, naturally, in the Standard Janpath Shopping Procedure:

1. Look into the wares of a roadside shop as you pass by, being VERY careful to get the right mix of interest and disdain in your eyes while you do it.

2. Casually examine one or two pieces that interest you, all the while carefully maintaining the aforementioned look.

3. Ask the price (Shift the interest-disdain mix from your eyes to your tone now).

4. Break out into derisive laughter as soon as the price is quoted, and counter it with your own price – which should be at MOST a quarter of the price quoted to you. The shop boy will counter this with his own even-more-derisive laughter – don’t be daunted.

5. After a few iterations of the previous step, say ‘Nahi chaiye, bhaiya’, and make an exaggerated show of walking off. This is the ‘make or break’ point.

6. If you lose this gamble, too bad. It’s likely the exact same thing will be available in at least 15 other shops on the same street, or at Sarojini Nagar, so you can try your luck in any of those. And if you win, gloat inwardly - planning how you will show your ‘catch’ off to your friends later.

Oh yes, we had loads of fun! But the real adventures that day had been elsewhere...

Delhi Daredevils

No, it’s not another IPL scandal that I am talking about. It’s the cycle-rickshaw pullers of Janakpuri.

Imagine the scenario. It’s the first day of my holiday, and I am off for what I hope will be a memorable outing with my daughter. Humming a happy tune, I amble up to a waiting cycle rickshaw, do the mandatory ‘Kya baat karte ho bhaiya, TEES?!! Metro station tak bees hi hotein hain, hum toh roz jaatein hai!” routine, and then settle in cosily on the seat - looking forward to a nice, long, unhurried ride to the Metro station.

Barely 100 metres into the ride, my hopes of a pleasant ride are dashed quite firmly. The rickshaw-walla, obviously suffering from the delusion that he was Michael Schumacher, started racing away like a maniac. And that too, on a road which someone seemed to have dug up and forgotten all about - a bed of spiky stones and dust. It was a ten-minute-long torture session - with me sitting there trying to divert myself by counting how many motor vehicles we overtook, while my insides felt as if someone was making a nice tossed salad with them.

The rickshaw-walla with the Schumacher Delusion...

And let me tell you, if you thought there could not be more than one rickshaw-puller in Janakpuri with the Schumacher syndrome, you would be wrong. If we got Schumacher on our onwards journey, on the way back it was Schumacher-With-a-Death-Wish. The guy actually rode (at top speed, naturally!) on the wrong side of the road - AGAINST the oncoming traffic! (For a stretch that seemed to me like 20 km, but was probably just 200 metres or so.)

Well, the bright side of these rides was that I returned home enlightened – with a hugely enhanced vocabulary of ma-behen expletives. You have to admit - there are some things in which Delhi never disappoints! 

And I think I finally have this fascination for Delhi kind of figured out. You remember those colourful 'goggles' sold by hawkers who used to move around selling cheap plastic toys once upon a time? The ones in which the 'lenses' were simply two pieces of brightly coloured translucent paper inserted into a cardpaper frame? See, the moment I get on to a plane/train to Delhi, I subconsciously put on one of those, and keep them on throughout my trip. Everything I see or do in Delhi is filtered through these - these psychedelic glasses named 'childhood'.

Yes, when I come to Delhi, it feels like coming home. Coming home to childhood.

Simply Tintin

Last week, I revisited my childhood – I went to watch The Adventures of Tintin. Aajkal toh combo-packs ka zamana hai...this too was a combo-pack of 3 Tintin stories in one – The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s treasure.

Sitting chomping popcorn and gobbling ice cream in the theatre, I was transported back to my childhood – when I would sit for hours with a Tintin comic in one hand, and a large supply of namkeen, chocolates and dry fruits near the other. My Ma would hover around in the background, grumbling continuously about what miracles I could have done if only I had been this attentive to studies, but I would be lost to the world, transported into the imaginary realm where I was with Tintin every step of the way in his adventures.

I would sit giggling at the goof-ups of the dumb detective duo Thomson and Thompson, smile at the antics of the hard-of-hearing Prof Calculus, and chuckle at the smart-alecky comments made by Snowy at crucial junctures. But my favourite was – you’re right, the adorable Captain Haddock, with his colourful language… ‘Billions  of blue blistering barnacles’ and ‘Ten thousand thundering typhoons’ …not to mention ‘Ectoplasm’, ‘Moth-eaten marmot’, and even ‘Logarithm’!!! :D

If only real-life curse words were so beautifully imaginative, and yet harmless!

As a child, I would have totally loved to possess the entire collection of Tintin comics, but there was only one hitch – they were expensive. I remember buying my first Tintin comic for Rs. 19 – a princely sum in the mid-seventies. And I still have a soft corner for the relative who bought me ‘Prisoners of the Sun’ which I desperately wanted, after the price had gone up to Rs. 27. But it was well worth its cost – I would read each comic a hundred times over, laughing over and over again at the same panel!

People who shared this passion automatically became dear friends. And friends who shared this passion became that much dearer! Unlike other books, nobody would easily lend a Tintin comic to even their dearest friend, though – all chances were that it would never come back.

I was addicted to Tintin till my late twenties. And while watching the movie, all the nostalgia came swooshing down on me. Immediately after the movie, I started showing withdrawal symptoms, and re-read the only one still in our possession – Destination Moon. Now I believe I am re-addicted and am contemplating buying some of them (if not the whole lot) again!

As for the movie - there were times when I wished the makers had preserved the original bits from the stories. And I found the seemingly mindless action scenes at the climax especially irritating – with machines whirring about without making any sense to me, at least. But there were lots of good things too – the 3 stories were woven together pretty seamlessly, and the all the characters looked pretty realistic in the 3-D animation. So realistic, that it was easy to forget that it was an animation film and the people walking about were not real actors!

But the thing I missed the most from the comics were the expressions that Georges Remi managed to put on the faces of his characters – no doubt he was exceptionally talented in that. The expressions on the faces of even the most insignificant of characters are done to the smallest detail. To see what I mean, take a dekko below at the 'not amused' look on the face of the disdainful llama when the Captain makes friendly overtures to it in Prisoners of the Sun! And then, the Captain keeps getting harassed by llamas repeatedly throughout the story, and then, finally, at the end, gets his revenge by spraying water on the face of a llama. The expression on the face of that hapless llama is totally priceless! :) (I could not find that image on the net, and I don't have the comic, but that look is just stuck to my memory!!) Absolutely CLASSIC! And that kind of million-dollar-expressions were missing in the movie!

The disdainful and 'not amused' expression on the face of the llama as the Captain tries to make friendly overtures to it...

I also happened to watch RaOne a few weeks ago. I noticed there were definitely more kids in the auditorium for that movie than for Tintin. I can imagine how today's kids, exposed to mindless violence and blood and gore through TV, films and even animation films, must be identifying so much more with RaOne with its 'ultimate villain' than with Tintin, embodying 'ultimate goodness'.


Sad. I for one definitely believe that today's kids need much higher doses of Tintin and the like, and lower doses of films showing inane violence... though I doubt many youngsters will agree with me...