Author Archives: Srajan Bhatnagar

Childhood memories…

Childhood days are the best days of our lives. Kids are free from all the materialistic things of the world. Children play endlessly, dream, laugh and always make others around them happy. Kids are the most energetic section of society; they are always full of energy and can do almost anything with their strong will power.

We all remember our childhood days, the cricket, the cycle races, the park, the swings, the cartoons ,the comics . When I look back at my childhood (though I’m only 16 yet, but yes a lot of responsibilities are on my shoulders now so don’t feel like a child anymore) the part I miss the most about mine is how as a kid I used to find delight in doing small little stupid activities. Yes, when we were children we used to spend a lot of our time doing weird things and playing senseless games. Sometimes alone, sometimes with our siblings or with grandparents .admit it you all have done it in your childhood. However stupid they may seem now, but they are a very close part of us and these memories are still closest to our hearts.

So here I am writing after almost half a year sharing some of my stupidities. Hope you all relate to this.

1. When I was 4 one of my most much-loved pastimes was cloud gazing. Well this isn’t an official name for this thing and I don’t know what precisely this activity is called. As a kid I always looked at the sky while travelling with my dad in the car and used to imagine shapes in the clouds. It was lovely; it was like playing with one of god’s most wonderful creations. I remember I discovered dragons flying high, trees, large creamy spoons. The twilight clouds used to look like they were on orange fire. I spotted almost everything in my little mind from bugs bunny to birthday hats. Sometimes I would go to the roof of the building just to enjoy the clouds.

Even till today, every now and then find time to do it. Especially near the Independence Day when I spend quite a time on the roof. Sometimes I do it from the car while I m on a driving holiday. Cloud gazing is one of the few things that get me back to my childhood and I rediscover the four year old in me. I sometimes meet the cool kid I used to be.

2. I don’t know what to name this activity. Umm… Lets just call it bike racing but it is as opposite to bike racing as possible. It was totally safe. I always won the race and I didn’t even need a racing track. I was roughly 5-6 years old when like every other boy; I fell in love with the bikes. I found bikes irresistible. They are strong sexy machines. Of course, I had my cycle with the supporting wheels but cycling looked so uncool in front of biking. I wanted to ride one so badly that every now and then I would climb up my dad’s bike. My hand would barely reach the handles and my legs would be nowhere near the brake and gears, but I sat on the bike and fabricated that I m riding like a stud. I used to imagine all of it, the crowd cheering, my opponents trying to beat me, the cheerleaders cheering for me. And everyday I used to win one or other championship.

I don’t know how many of you did this or how many of you relate to this, but I loved this activity and it consumed a whole lot of my time. I don’t do it nowadays, probably I would feel too stupid….i mean a 16 year old sitting on a bike and making all kinds of noises.

3. This was me and my cousin’s favourite game for a very long period of time. We used to call it 1, 2, 3 JUMP. The game involved doing nothing but, climbing on the side of the bed, holding hands and then jumping as hard as you can. I don’t remember who introduced me to this or when I first played this game. I left playing this at the age of around 8 when I accidentally fell of the bed and hurt my forehead. I still have photographs of me and the company holding hands, ready to jump our way to the fun.

4. I don’t know if your parents allowed this but mine certainly did. Scribing on the walls was always a routine. I had a special corner in my room, near the divan where I just used to sit and write, draw and even paint sometimes. I started doing this as soon as my mom taught me how to hold a pencil. I was too clumsy to keep the pages safely so I always used the walls. I still remember that huge lizard I made with my green crayon, and a very unique ‘A’ which anyone would mistake for an ‘O’. I even tried to make a locomotive (inspired from my train set). I still remember that I felt very bad when that wall was repainted. I don’t enjoy it now. I am too conscious of the house I live in now. Sometimes so much that I forget that I am the owner (not caretaker) and this house is made for me. I sometimes still miss the place where I spent my childhood. For grown ups , house is just a property of a few lakhs , as we grow old we get more addicted to money. Lets not talk about it here but please dear readers  do give it a thought.

5. Pen-fight. Yaa, you guessed it right. I don’t think I need to explain this one. Everyone plays this at some point of time in their childhood. It first started when I was nine; a friend of mine introduced this to me. We first started playing this in the free time we got after finishing our three hour exam early. It started at sharpener fight, then to pencil fight, and finally reached the very popular pen fight. Each person sends one of his pens in the battlefield (the table) and gets alternate chances to strike his pen. The motto is to make your pen hit the opponent’s pen such that it falls down the table. There are no hard and fast rules to this game. That’s what makes it complicated as there are lots of fights and disagreements among the players. A lot of time I got too competitive with my friends and the matches took an ugly turn. Now, when I look back the fights are my best moments as a pen-fighter. Last time I was caught by my teacher playing the game was in 9^th standard. My English teacher just told me ,” Boys never grow up.”  I bet she was right.

Well, that was all for this time. I shared quite a few incidents and activities that shaped my childhood and hope that you relate to them and these words of mine take you back to yours….

 

If yesterday is better than today then we can make tomorrow even better

Hello everyone. I am not as experienced as the other authors on the GingerChai panel and I am very grateful to the editors for letting me share my thoughts through their website.

I have written letters previously for some online magazines but this article is something very close to my heart. All other articles were just creations of my crazy, weird mind or inspired from the incidents from my own life. I have always been very private person and personally don’t like to share my thoughts, feelings and even my near ones with others.

But, this time chachi Ms. Mani Padma has finally convinced to share my views and even share some of my feelings to the rest of the world.

I am sorry if you feel that I have not been able to write this article as good as someone else would have done but please excuse me as this is the first time I am sharing a part of me and not a part of my mischievous mind …

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This is dedicated to all my “strangers”

I am just 16years and 2 months old and I haven’t seen the world as much like philosophers to write a book on life.

But from the past 16 years of my experience I can surely say that life is a journey and mine has been a quite remarkable one till now. It’s been so interesting that it feels like a destination itself. Now, at 16, when I am leaving my school and taking a step further I have realized that journey of life is full of changes.

The journey that began as a new born moves on with his stupid games in the mud, from a crying schoolboy unwilling to go to school to a kid always wanting to play, time passes by and in the journey of our boy comes another day…many of the strangers (who he calls now friends) meet him for one last time… and some inexplicable feelings (he calls them emotions) conquer his mind… for a while and what remains is another feeling of fear… fear of not getting to spend 6 hours with friends anymore… fear of not being able to be himself and among his people… fear of not being able to see his first crush..

But the journey of life never stops and in the life of that boy comes another day, some other moments of happiness, and probably some other people whom he starts to call friends (but deep inside his heart he knows that these people are not friends according to his definition of friends which he learnt from some ‘strangers’ when he was young) But somewhere deep inside his heart a nostalgia remains. I hope that this nostalgia remains alive though hidden somewhere in hearts of each one of you. Let me share some of mine.

The nostalgia of the fun during the games period, of the smell of the mud and the masti on the park swings during the rains, nostalgia of pretending to be sick on the day of the test and forcing your mother to write a totally false absentee note, of the bicycle races on the way home from school, of the pranks we played on our friends, of imitating teacher, of running wild in the playground…

I believe each and every one of us faces these nostalgia’s and many more during our chats with ourselves…

Today at this point of my life it looks as if yesterday was a lot better than today. Frankly I probably would want to go back in time and spend the last 7 years of my school again but if yesterday is better than today then we can make tomorrow even better than yesterday. Let me tell one of my own experiences very close to my heart.

After our school farewell we friends were walking towards the bus stop. I was on the phone with one of my friends who had chosen to skip the farewell. The 200 metre walk from the school to the stop usually takes 5 minutes as I was talking to my friend I realized that I did not leave anything behind in school, I was carrying all my knowledge and my character with me and all my friends were still there. I realized that leaving the school was a desirable change as I did not loose anything. I will always be grateful to my school for developing me the right way but I realized that it is not something I want to hold onto for the rest of my life but if leaving school means leaving friends and teachers and all the things we learnt then that is not a desirable change and we should take control of our lives and not let undesirable changes happen. The walk felt like eternity. It was an inexplicable feeling in my heart. I didn’t want to go back to school… and I wished to walk with these people for the rest of my life… the journey felt like a destination then…

How our tomorrow will be depends a lot on the choices we make today. It depends on how much we control our lives and what we want from our lives, wherever we go tomorrow, whatever we do, whether we are happy or sad, we will always have the memories of these magic moments and we can have many more of these magic moments in future.

We can either move on and meet new people in the process or we can stay back with what we already have. Whatever our decisions may be but we will always have the memories of these magic moments….