The smell of School !

I guess school is going to start soon! That means every store has a "school" sale with things from notebooks, backpacks, shoes, down to the toilet items we found for "dorm" residents.

While the stores are busy selling anything and everything in the name of a "back to school" sale, what interested me was the smells as we walked through a section of the local Target store.

It was weird. I can easily understand one thought process jumping over to another, in my head. It is almost routine, as is obvious by the rambling in this space.

Have you, ever had a smell jump over and create a flashback smell in your head? It happened to me. I was in the notebook section and was taking a whiff of that smell which for some reason reminded me of those little erasers we used to have in 1st standard. The little orange or green ones, which have an outer shell that looks like a hippo or elephant or rhino, and you open the animal in the middle and inside is a nice cylindrical scented eraser! Remember those?

So there I am, in the middle of this aisle, with my nose held high, trying to savor that smell for a few more fleeting seconds, when all of a sudden, there is a smell jump! I suddenly smell fresh notebooks and brown paper, the ones we used to cover all our 192 page classwork and homework notebooks with, just two days before school started. That instantly brought a flood of memories.

Till I can remember, our school used to give out the books from the "school book store", three or four days before school started. This way we could cover all the texts, notebooks etc, with brown paper covers. These large sheets of brown paper would cover at least 4 of the 192 page std notebooks. Later in life they introduced the long "Assignment" notebook, which would make sure that we wasted enough of this paper.

My parents would theorize that the school must be in cahoots with the brown paper manufacturer association because they would mandate all kids wrap the notebooks! If we did not comply, we would get "blackmarks". Yes! you got that right. There was a chart in every classroom called the "Blackmark chart". 10 signatures from the teachers, and you get to go to the principals office!

In different sections, this chart would show different trends. In rooms where the kids were all dorks and extremely competitive, the chart would be near empty! In rooms where kids would pride themselves on getting in trouble, it would be a race to get to the maximum limit of 30, at which point you got to stand outside the principals office the whole day, get the occasional insult from the PT master and life would go on!

As usual, I digress! What were we talking about? Ah, yes, the smell of 30% fresh notebooks, 30% brownpaper, mixed with another 10% of glue (the green goopy maida flour glue!). Add to that the smells of new plastic lined school bags from the local "Amma Fancy store", new Bata canvas shoes, the unique smell of white shoe polish that we would apply in multiple coats, the smell of the new school belt, the smell of school uniforms, fresh from the "Artland" tailor shop, etc. etc., and you start wondering "Looks like it was not a bad childhood after all. So many great memories!".

Well, I even get a flashback smell, of the dreaded hair full of coconut oil, which my mom or aunts or grandma (in some cases all of them) would come and apply to support me on my first day of school, which would instantly turn me into mosquito man (kid you not, you could visibly see a mosquito halo around my head with all that oil) and make my friends joke, "enna da, ennai kadaiyave thalaiyile thookindu vare?" (What gives? It looks like you are carrying an entire oil store on your head!).

Just as those memories vanished into the background, saw that Jr. was smelling everything as well, just like dear old daddy!

Hopefully, we made her childhood experience of getting ready for school a memorable one. Who knows, a few decades from now, there might be a Jr. blogpost on school shopping and the smell of school supplies at Target!

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Bambara pai Sundaram..

A goody bag was brought home by the 4 year old. In it, among the many other useless plastic trinkets that find their way to the trash can, a small top! Clear transparent top piece, pink bottom piece, a small sticker in the middle which said "pull me".

Went ahead and pulled and a small blinking LED inside the top showed me that the little button cell inside still had some juice. You spin the top and the light comes on. The nerd in me promptly investigated it and found that there was a small spring inside which made electrical contact everytime the top hit critical angular velocity.

All those Balu class fundas from ages ago came back to me in a rush. Those diagrams with nicely labeled circles, tangential arrows, radial arrows, the greek symbols. Seems like yesterday, that the obsessive student in me was just practising drawing perfect arrowmarks before physics class started on top of the Oxford English school terrace in Madras.

There are no arrows to draw today, but I did do a thorough inspection of the top. There wasnt much to it and it stopped lighting up after a few spins. Recently heard a news piece on the deteriorating quality of products made in China. This top, and almost all the stuff you find in goody bags (purchased in bulk by parents from party stores) are unsafe for children! I do not think they are held to any standard! Sad thing is that almost all parents buy these in bulk and put two or three in a goody bag and distribute it to other kids in the daycare as gifts. Isn't there some regulatory body that looks into these plastic trinkets and pulls them off the market ? Probably not. The Chinese Association for Goody Bag Trinkets probably has a lobby in Washington that ensures their mass production and distribution.

This thought, was thoroughly depressing and to take my mind off it, I started reminescing about the good old days, of my own childhood. What did I do in all those summer vacations? What did I play with in the absence of remote controlled Hummers and toy dogs that eat pellets and poop them out? I played with kites, tops, marbles, etc..

Yes, I had tops too. A whole bunch of them. I used to haul them around in a yellow cloth bag which had a picture of Thirupathi Balaji on one side and the name of a Sari store on the other. Needless to say, there were a few top strings (Jaati's) in black and red, with one end tied in knots and the other end frayed to varying degrees to get a good grip on the nail!

In a nutshell,

Canon EOS : Tamron Lens :: Wooden nail top : Jaati

Tamrac was not around in those days to come up with a fancy bag for my tops and a separate accessory pouch for those strings, or they would have had their first paying customer!

The added bonus was that yours truly was a top expert. The game of tops, when played appropriately, (I always made the rules in my street) would earn the winner the tops of the losers. Needless to say, the bag was always increasing in weight, albeit slowly! I would lose an occasional top or two to some of my friends or my trusted lieutenant aka my brother. My brother started his own bag, but carrying his bag and mine was getting on his nerves and eventually we just pooled in our collection and the title of "Bambara pai Sundaram" was conferred on me by all the local uncles who between sipping their weekend morning coffee and their Hindu newspapers, watched our game with amusement.

"That boy sure knows how to hustle a top or two!" or "Ramanukku eththa Lakshmanan paaru!", they would exclaim after watching our game. Me and my brother were one perfect team and we were pros, all at the young age of 10 and 8! Tiger Woods Viger Woods, Bah! If only there was a world Bambara championship, two child proteges would have come to the limelight twenty something odd years ago! But lets not dwell on past injustices and focus on the future!

I went to India recently to buy a top, just to show my little darlings how Daddy and Chitappa used to while away their summer vacations and was surprised to find that these wooden tops with the nail driven from their head were nowhere to be found. Grandpa came to the rescue and we finally found some in the old Mandaveli market! I bought a few, wondering all the time if the Department of Homeland Security would confiscate them because they look like grenades on the X-ray scan! Luckily, the tops made it back to the US of A and are now used to amuse the little ones on an occasional basis! Granted, today's kid is probably watching "Hits of Sachin" re-runs on the sports channel or staring wide eyed at skimpily clad youth on MTV and the streets are not exactly condusive to playing tops either, what with the frequent interruptions of the Kinetic Honda's and TVS mopeds, but the question still begs to be asked!

Where have all the bambarams gone ?

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