My education from fun, desi sports of the 1960’s

By George Abraham, secretary Aviation Industry Employees Guild*

When my three children were in middle school, I would often boast to them that, when I was their age, I had a much better life. I realize that every older generation says such things, whether valid or not. In my case, I was only comparing my playing desi sports and games to my kids spending their evening indoors, messaging friends or watching videos on their mobile phones.  

I grew up, and still reside, in Kalina, a suburb of Mumbai. Today, following six decades of booming housing construction, there are few open spaces in the suburbs for kids to play. In Kalina though there are still large playing fields: in the two gated residential building complexes for Air India employees; in the Sundar Nagar housing complex; at St. Mary’s school and on the main campus of Mumbai University.

So yes, in Kalina I see kids play cricket and football (soccer) as I did over fifty years ago. But I don’t see them play the desi sports and games I played with equipment that cost little or no money and required little space.

For me, a new year began in the first week of June, with the start of school. It coincides with the onset of the monsoon season, which lasts till late August. We get lots of rain, sometimes for days.

Most evenings during the monsoon, I played football on the large field at the center of the old Air India complex, where we lived. One of my big achievements in high school was to get selected to the St. Mary’s football team. However, my six sisters pressured my mother to not let me join the team since they did not want their only brother to get badly injured chasing a soccer ball.  

Some evenings, when the field was covered in water, Mom said I could not play football. I would have to take a shower and wash my clothes elsewhere to be allowed back in the apartment, she would say. I was disappointed since football was also an excuse to splash around in wet, muddy fields.

But I got out of the house, even if it rained, to spin tops. These brightly colored wooden toys are conical or oval in shape, tapering to a point with a metal tip. The key is to find well balanced tops with good grooves on the side and a smooth tip, so they can spin for a longer time.

You start by coiling a string around the grooves. Then, holding the loose end of the string between your fingers, you hurl the spinning top onto a flat surface, usually in a building lobby. I once tried to practice in our apartment. But Mom seized my top since its tip made holes in the polished floor.

It was clearly evident that Arvind, Dilip and Raju had superior skills. They were popular and had an audience of envious kids watching their tops spinning for a much longer time than most of us could. They also spread their fingers flat on the ground, enabling the top to spin onto their palms. Arvind could simultaneously unwind and pull back the string, so that the top would boomerang in the air, land on his outstretched palm and continue spinning. Arvind was a natural athlete, also good in cricket, football and other sports. But he was not a team player and would often angrily walk out of a game, upset with a play or a player or a referee’s call. Arvind, who retired as a mid-level bank executive, died of a heart attack a few years ago.

The monsoon season is a time of windy weather. So, on most evenings, when it was not raining, the sky was dotted with colorful patangs, or kites. The paper kites, mostly square or diamond in shape, were of different sizes. Teenage boys, and some young men, flew kites from building terraces or from the ground. They controlled the kite with the manja, or string, which was wound on a phirky, or wooden spool, held by a younger kid.

Kishore, Sunil and Munna navigated their kites to glide, spin, pull back sharply or float away quickly, while trying to cut the string of a rival’s kite. When they succeeded, there would be a loud cheer from the kids supporting them. It was rare for their kites to be cut by a rival. 

While skill was important, so was the quality of the string. Strings were coated with glass powder to give an edge in the kite fights. Kishore would buy string, reinforced with secret ingredients, from stores in Byculla and Bhendi Bazaar. He would not disclose the name of the stores to prevent his rivals from buying the same string.    

There was intense, often years long rivalry between some of the major kite flyers. Some of the fights in the air spilled into physical fights on the ground.

Like other children, who were not good or too small to fly kites, I chased the kites that were cut, as they floated to the ground. Some kids used long sticks, with a branch attached to the top, to grab the string before it reached the ground. Also, a few bullies sought to capture all the kites. Even if you caught a kite you gave it to the bullies if they wanted it. One of them would tear the kite if you did not give it to him.   

Up until I was in high school, I also played hopping games hopscotch and langdi  and lagori,, or seven tiles, and marbles. While you could play hopscotch and marbles by yourself, lagori was a contest between two teams, at times with twenty girls and boys on each side. (These games are described below at the end..*)

I was best at gilli danda. We got two round sticks, usually by chopping down branches from a tamarind tree. Gilli, the smaller stick, is about three inches long and half an inch in diameter. Using a knife, we scraped its two ends into a sharp point. Danda, the longer stick, is about a foot long and an inch in diameter.

There is no limit on the number of players and you can also have contesting teams. But the game requires space and, as I found out, safety precautions.

A gilli is placed on the ground. A player taps its edge with the danda to flip it in the air. While the gilli is in the air, the player strikes it hard with the danda. The one who hits the gilli the longest distance wins.

I could tap the gilli multiple times, while it was in the air, before hitting it hard. So, my total distance was the length the gilli traveled multiplied by the number of taps. I could tap up to eight times and hence did well in the game.   

Once, when I was eleven years old, I was daydreaming when a gilli, hit by Minu, landed on my upper lip. I wiped off the blood and Minu said the bleeding had stopped. I went home pretending nothing happened. Seeing blood on my face, Mom rushed and told Dad. He was reading the newspaper, having just come home from work. Dad got a taxi and took me to the emergency room at Sion Hospital. After he sealed the wound with three stitches, the doctor said I was lucky the gilli missed my eyes.

A few days later I was back playing the game I liked most. For weeks, Minu feared that my parents would tell his parents. But my parents kept quiet about the accident. Minu retired from Indian Airlines as a customer service officer and lives nearby in Vakola.

We played most of the desi sports throughout the year, especially during the three weeks in October, when school was closed for the Diwali – festival of lights - holidays and in May, after the end of the school year. The desi games were played in other parts of India too, but often under different local names.  

Most of us did not keep score during the games, but knew our relative standing. We used the scores mainly to tease each other. However there were some kids who always wanted to win, tried to cheat and argued when they lost. I avoided playing with them.   

While not widely played, at least in Mumbai, some of the desi games are still around today. But they cost money or have morphed to require no skill. For instance, while our cost to play hopscotch was zero, mats for the game sell as “outdoor puzzle mats” for Rs.799 ($10.50.) Then you can buy battery-operated spinning tops, with colorful lights, starting at Rs. 165 ($2.20).

I am tempted to make big claims for the desi sports of my childhood. In 1815, a British army, led by the Duke of Wellington, defeated the French in the battle of Waterloo, thereby ending Napoleon’s grand military ambitions. “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton,” the Duke said. He was educated at Eton, the top private school for boys in the U.K.    

Instead, I will say that the desi games I played in the 1960’s were good exercise, kept me busy and rarely bored, instilled the necessity of practice, made me respect those with character and skills and helped me develop life-long friendships, irrespective of whether a person is a Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Parsi or Jew, high or low caste, Maharashtrian or Tamilian, girl or boy, daughter of a pilot or son of a cleaning lady - all things that I continue to value today.  

*Lagori and other desi games

In langdi, you draw a circle with a chalk, usually on a dead-end road where there was little vehicular traffic. The size of the circle depends on the number of players.

One of the players is the hunter. She hops on one leg and chases the other kids. If she touches you, or if you step outside the circle, it’s your turn to be the hunter. The girls, including my sisters, were much faster than the boys as both hunter and hunted.   

When there was no one around to join me, I played hopscotch. If there were others, there was no limit on the number of players. Using chalk, we drew and numbered eight square blocks, each about 2 feet x 2 feet.

In hopscotch, players take turns and throw a small, flat stone aiming for the blocks furthest away, with the higher numbers. If the stone lands outside the squares or on a line then we are out of the game. When it lands within a block, we hop on one leg on every block, pick up the stone and return to the start. For instance, if you return, after picking the stone from the 6th square, without touching any lines, you got six points.

Playing goti, or marbles, also does not require much space. We played several types of games with round marbles of different sizes and made of different substances. In one, a player tosses a small glass marble a few feet away. The other players toss their marbles, trying to reach the first marble. Then they take turns, starting with one whose marble is farthest, to hit the first marble. To do this, they launch their marble with the index or middle finger, while the thumb stays on the ground. The one who knocks the first marble then gets to lead the next round of play.

Another marble game was Koyba. A 2 feet square outline is drawn on the ground, against a wall. A small hole is dug at the center. The plastic marbles we used were about half an inch in diameter. Since my dad worked in the hangars of Air India, I also got steel balls discarded from aircraft parts, which I used to play Koyba.

From a distance of about six feet, a player throws two marbles into the square, trying to get one or both to drop into the hole. Next, using a third marble, he tries to knock one or both marbles out of the square. If he knocks a marble, which fell into the hole, he gets extra points. After each round, the losers give the winner glass marbles to settle the points.    

Rasool was very good at Koyba, hitting a marble out of the square 9 out of 10 times. By the time he was 14, he was nearly six feet tall. He was recruited by a local gangster who organized matches where people bet money on the outcome of each round. Before Rasool finished high school, his family emigrated to Pakistan. I later heard stories that he became a major gangster.

Lagori, or seven tiles, was a contest between two teams, at times with twenty players on each team. When one of the teams had a good player, the other team captain would often be allowed to take an extra person.

Seven flat stones are piled on top of each other, within a circle drawn with chalk. A member of the attacking team starts the game by aiming a ball to knock down the stones. When the stones are knocked down, the defending team members try to stack them up again. They have to do this while avoiding being hit by the ball, thrown at them by the attacking team. If the ball touches a defending team member, she or he is out of the game. The contest continues till all the members of one of the teams are out of the game.

When it got dark, and our siblings and parents shouted that we should get home, the team with the highest total score was the winner.

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*George Abraham is general secretary of the Aviation Industry Employees Guild, India; an official of the International Transport Workers Federation; and a general secretary of the Mumbai Regional Congress Committee. Earlier he was elected a councilor of the Mumbai Municipal Corporation, which administers Mumbai, for three five-year terms. He retired from Air India.