Less is definitely more

Photo: the 'Bertie gang' with their home made from nothings

People much better qualified than me (Prof Arvind Gupta is one of them) to comment on this have said this before, but it bears repetition: giving kids too many things to play with simply makes them blasé, bored, and bozo-like. Out of the window goes imagination and resourcefulness. At the risk of being told that I am looking at poverty and deprivation with rose tinted glasses, I will say this: today when I see kids surrounded by Lego, and model cars and ramps and trains and gameboy or whatever its latest version, I see passive consumers, and not happy kids, and definitely not creative people in-the-making. On top of everything, many kids over-blessed with toys hang around endlessly waiting for some adult to come and look into a manual or a booklet, and show them how to play or play with them.
Does anyone remember a time, when as kids we played with a limited bunch of toys, but with cartloads of inventiveness, and our parents did not need to get involved at all? But forget that ‘when we were kids’ thing. Just take a look at kids today outside the ‘charmed’ circle. You don’t have to go deep into the hinterland at all – just go look at your maid’s kids or kids at a construction site. Now before someone comes at me to spear me with a javelin, let me make it clear that I don’t think they live in ideal childhood conditions, not by a long chalk – but when I look at their ability to self-generate hours of hands-on fun for themselves, sometimes literally out of nothing, I feel there are some superb lessons hidden in there that bypass our better off kids completely. For which we then send them to creativity classes and leadership camps and such like.
Some months ago, I got nicely bound up with some kids who live on the outskirts, on a big dry plot in a tin shed. We kind of share a dog, Bertie (but that’s another story). Their dad is the watchman of the place, their mom looks after them, and the three of them go to a PMC school where they are taught amongst other things, English from a hilariously meaningless and irrelevant textbook which has poems in it with titles like “The Bionic Man” – which I did not understand one word of, so you can imagine what these kids are dealing with. So I teach them English that they could use when they are not talking to a Bionic Man (but again that’s another story). Point is, the youngest of the three – the nine year old and his cousin, who are berated off and on by their families for not doing well at school, not paying attention in class, not learning tables, etc...blew us all away with the truly fantastic mock model-houses that they have begun to build. These kids own literally no toys or paints or craft paper of modelling clay or building blocks or anything. But take a look at one of their models, and you will see, believe it or not: a two-storey house with walls, a roof, a tiled porch, a garage, a garden with a swimming pool and a dance floor with a mike. The whole complex is fenced in by what appears to be a neat bamboo compound wall. Each and every building material used is something that they have mopped up from the side of the road on their way home after enduring six hours of school. The ‘bamboo’ fencing comes from leftover phataka rolls that they found. The mike and flood lights for the dance floor come from some piece of electronic junk that they found – bits of circuitry and stuff. The ‘trees’ are the trimmed tops of palms from thrown away bouquets. The garden plants come from bits of sprouted potato pushed into the ground. Thermacol, cardboard, wet mud, rods, sticks, plastic food tubs (for a swimming pool)...all go into the making of this fantastic complex. At first when I saw it all, my urban instinct was to run out and get them Lego, and building blocks and mecano sets. Then I thought the better of it, and hand them odds-and-ends
from my house - things that I know they will incorporate imaginatively into their next grand scheme. What I am sneaking in, though, is sometimes a stray comment or idea that may prompt them to connect up with this: that learning arithmetic, science and languages will one day dovetail with their passion for building, and then they can perhaps grow up to become good masons and also great architects and town planners.