How did we spend our spare time as kids? How did we entertain ourselves back then to keep ourselves occupied?
Most of us would read. Anything we could get our hands on. We’d visit a library every week and exchange a book or two every time. Remember book libraries? I also remember waiting in queue every Tuesday afternoon for the DPL Mobile Library to make a stop at our colony, when we’d all clamber aboard the bus—renovated with rows of bookshelves and aisles in between, an initiative of the Delhi Public Library—to get our books exchanged. The same familiar faces would be seen every week waiting in queue, and we’d make new friends in the process.
Movies were special occasions, when Dad would take us to Regal or Rivoli or any of the theatres in Connaught Place for us to watch something on the gigantic screen, leaving us enthralled. (The chariot race in Ben Hur ? Wow!) There would be the ice cream treat to follow. As we grew older, celebrating birthdays meant treating one’s close friends to a movie at Chanakya, with a Coke and popcorn thrown in. The princely sum of Rs.40/- could provide four hungry teenagers a movie and snacks. The Sunday Doordarshan movie was something to look forward to, when we’d all congregate to those homes in the neighbourhood which would boast of a TV set. The kids would all sit on the carpet, and the grownups on the sofas and chairs, with all eyes glued to the black and white screen to watch Meena Kumari sob endearingly.
Late afternoons or early evenings generally would see us at play. Cricket, football, hockey, pitthu, Ice Pice(I Spy), maaran peeti…whatever took our fancy on that particular day. Or we’d take out our bicycles and cycle around the neighbourhood, pretending not to notice the girls skipping rope or playing hop scotch. If we had to remain indoors for whatever reason, we’d be playing board games—chess, Ludo, Scrabble, Monopoly. When tired of board games, we’d play Antakshari. We’d listen to music on the radio or on a record or cassette player. Or we’d write a letter to a pen friend somewhere halfway across the world, after planning excitedly for days what we would write about this time. And we’d collect postage stamps from all parts of the world—whatever we could get our hands on—and paste them in a special scrapbook.
And we’d dream. Our minds had a lot more time to wander. We’d do a lot of people-watching from our windows…. wondering where they were going, what they did for a living, why they looked sad or happy and so on. I think this particular activity of daydreaming gave us our curiosity, creativity and ability for deep thought.
That was then.
With the advent of technology, our means to amuse ourselves changed too. We found ourselves with less time on our hands—I’m not sure why—but spoilt for choices with the modes of entertainment available. There are now too many choices! But nobody seems to have the time.
Digital technology and the Internet have taken over our lives. We have all changed. Not that we had an option. To a person like me who’d sent India Post postcards to his friends and family from outstation with all the news he had to offer on that card for the postman and the rest of the world to read, worrying nowadays about end-to-end encryption to protect my privacy on WhatsApp is really having come a long way, isn’t it?
Movies and TV—all in HD—are now watched in the comfort of our homes. My son has a Netflix account and I an Amazon Prime one. Together on both these platforms there are so many movies or shows to watch—hundreds! I haven’t really counted—that we generally end up watching nothing! Too many choices. Going to the movies—I stopped doing that long ago, even before the pandemic. Just not worth the trouble and expense.
TV news is now round the clock, but nobody’s really watching for more than 30 minutes in a day. We listen to digitized music on our little iPods and cell-phones, occasionally amplifying the sound through wireless Bluetooth speakers, but are we really listening to the lyrics or the nuances in the song? We are surgically attached to our cell-phones with which we’re texting or gaming or video chatting or watching clips or surfing social media…flitting from one to the other. Outside the home, youngsters are seeking malls, not playgrounds, for their entertainment…. to shop, eat, hang out or catch a movie. The number of people with a reading habit has diminished because that activity just takes too long—who has the time and patience, generally speaking? Most students find it impossible to read a couple of pages continuously. There are more writers than readers nowadays.
So many options—yet we’re bored most of the time. Our attention span has gone to the dogs, as our perpetually shifting eyeballs flit from channel to channel, then on to OTT on TV, from novel to short story on our Kindles, from Facebook to Twitter on our tablets and from song to podcast on our iPods. The world is at our fingertips—news, events, shows, friends…. And yet, it is not enough. Something seems to be missing.
So, is this it? What more can there possibly be? Total Virtual Reality? Like in those unfathomable The Matrix movies in which the players, while hooked up to VR devices, not moving from their chairs, are experiencing all of the sensations of actual movement—with a few impossible moves tossed in—just for fun? I hope not. It will be a sad day indeed if that is all we come to, sitting in front of a computer or gaming gizmo for every bit of our entertainment while popping our ‘meals in a pill.’
To not venture outside, to not smell the dewy grass or look at a clear sky, to not feel the rain or sunshine on our shoulders, to not listen to the birds or the song of the breeze…. I’m glad I won’t be around to see that day.
Beetashok Chatterjee is the author of ‘Driftwood’, a collection of stories about Life at Sea and ‘The People Tree’, another collection of stories about ordinary people with extraordinary lives. A retired merchant ship’s captain by profession, he lives in New Delhi with his memories of living more than 40 years on the waves.
His book is available on Amazon. Click here.
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