Remembering the Summers....

"Do children really need such long summer breaks?- A question was posed in the newspaper few days back. According to the "experts" longs breaks disrupt the development process and come in way of the learning process. But Its also been seen that these days children end up doing way too much during their vacations, given the plethora of courses and workshops involving swimming, music, art, personality development, computers, sports and the like that seem to cram their calendar. Even the trips taken in the name of holidays seem to be laden with exotic destinations and customized experiences packed into a short period of time. A trip to Europe in ten days, Australia in a week.... and come back fully loaded with overflowing suitcases and digital memories. I am not sure if that's a positive or a negative thing but more than a "break" the holidays today seem to be intensified search for experiences that are not normally encountered in everyday life...

I feel privileged to have experienced a different kind of summer, which was a far cry from the vacations today. For me holidays every year meant one thing and just one thing alone... visiting my grandmom's place. And for almost everyone it was the same. You went back to your 'native place', logging in with the emotional headquarters of your extended family and spent your entire two months with mama, mami, kaka, kaku, maushi cousins and grand parents. The happiest memories of childhood of a whole generation seem to be centered around this annual ritual of homecoming. 

Of course... if i look back i do realize, that there is very little i did.. barring the rationed hedonism of a movie every week and the exuberant forays into street foods... the two long months were spent in doing small things with inordinate pleasure. Idiotic invented games with cousins, pillow fights, midnight snacks, boardgames where everyone felt duty bound to cheat and the raucous attempts at antakshari were all ways we found of rescuing pleasure out of the trivial. Boredom yawned frequently and stretched languidly even more often. Complaints of boredom to parents resulted in the ultimate punishment- being carted to sundry relatives whose claim to any kinship tie was extremely tenuous: he is your first cousin's father-in-law and his brother was our neighbor in Bijapur twenty years ago, seemed to be a good reason enough. The more obscure the relative, the greater the chances of encountering "do you remember who I am' questions which always ended in incoherent mumbles.

When I look back it just amazes me to see how little material was used in creating such rich and satisfying experiences. Scarcity when pooled seemed to transform magically into an abiding sense of plenty. It was like... the pleasure derived from a source grew in inverse proportion to its availability. So, travelling in an overcrowded rickshaw was more fun than just three people travelling in it. Five beds on a terrace accommodated eight, but there was not a single passing thought of any discomfort that i remember. There was no concept of the personal, and virtually no conception of privacy. I still remember the "legendary" blasting session from my parents for locking the door and having a mini gossip session with my cousins! 

Come to think of it, summer was not really a break but a joint. It was a bridge that connected one with his own larger community. One did not travel. One returned. The attempt was not to experience the new and the extraordinary but one that emphatically underlined the power of the old and the ordinary.

With times changing, what we seek from our summer breaks too has changed in a fundamental way. Today we love our work and are very much attached to it and the summer helps us to detach from it temporarily. We tend to "refuel" ourselves with much more materials than we did in the past.

But for those who grew up in different times.... summers were probably the best times of our lives....

Cheers!