By Bobo Khuraijam
Winter helps. The free lunch at a friend’s place was terrific. Moment slips away like smart thieveswhen the company is wholehearted and unrestrained. We would not realise the starch cementing on our hands. When the food was servedit was about Moreh. It was Kim Kardashian’s vital statistics after the food. How did we land there? None of us could explain.But this time we could not afford to spent longer hour on treatise like those. Children were waiting for the day out. A day of freedom from their routine, what was even more liberating for them was a day off from tuition on a working day.
FAT LESSON: It has been ages that we have stopped going to the cinema theatres in the town. First of all, the theaters have remained the same. Imagine an adult who has not taken a single bath since birth. The aroma of human excreata accumulated since time ancient is still there to serve cine-goers. The sultry air bereft of oxygen is still there in plenty. The seats and the bugs are still there to massage. More importantly, the films being shown have assumed a quantum leap in terms of brilliance. It has gone way ahead of our time. Heaven may fall; these theatres will remain the same. Therefore the option is: stay home, stay foolish, instead of being a démodé cinephile. Meanwhile, a film festival had arrived in the town. Children film festival. It was at the multipurpose auditorium near the palace gate. In recent times the place has become an amiable destination for event like festivals. So we decided to take some children to the festival. The wide and open lawn within the premises of the auditorium provides a soothing breathing space. We could notice the amazement on the children’s’ faces when they saw the sprawling architecture. The previous show was nearing its end. We had to wait for the next screening. Problem was, asking the children to stay still and wait for something to begin. In their true spirit they turned the concrete lawn into a playground. Up and down they ran, with sweat all over their body. Reminiscence of school days ran in our mind. The difference is we ran on playground filled with grass. A green playground is something which is gravely missing in most of the schools today. Our ingenious educationists who are running educational centers without playground would love to recall. What kind of games they played on the school playground. What kind of lessons they learned from it. We agree the world is moving fast. Accordingly they have new learning module. More text books, home – work, class –work, test notebooks all piled up into a truckload called school bag.Our children carry it on their back like a beast of burden. We believed among those books there must be something called physical education. Should they consider removing that portion? They would not. Part of the business, err … part of the syllabus.
TOY STORY: There were few more minutes to the scheduled screening. Soon the children came running to us. Achapot! They shouted in unison with their fingers pointing towards the gate.Stickers, aeroplane, car, tortoise, lizards, spinning top … you name it. These are the toys that come with the crunchy eatables inside thecolourful plastic packets. Free, it comes. Children just love it. Hurriedly they tore open the packets. Oh baby! One of the kids was almost crying. He could not find any free toy in her packet. We rushed like fire fighters to buy another packet for him. Great are those minds thatgave birth to the idea of free toys in a food packet. Most of the children insist their parents to buy achapot with free toys. The notion of getting something free has already been ingrained into the young minds. Parents would just buy them to satisfy their children’s demand. We hope, in the future these children would grow up to be tax paying citizens who are well aware of their duties. Some of them would be workingas government employees. We hope, they would not waste time running after ‘no due certificate’ for their monthly salary. The bond of trust the government share with their employees is ground breaking in these part of the world. We hope, when these children grows up they would break the entire bond.
THE SHOWTIME: had already arrived before the children finish their snacks. We ushered them quickly inside the hall. The giant curtain getting separated and collapsing to the flanks drew good attention from the kids. They clapped when the first ray of light kissed the white screen with images. “This television is thousand times bigger than our TV”, some of the kids uttered. It was an animated movie that was screened. The kids gave rapt attention to the screen. After half an hour or so, they started showing sign of displeasure. It was an unpleasant revelation for us. The film especially made for children, screened at a children festival failed to excite them. Of course, there were children who were slightly grown up trying to make sense out of the movie. The film was rich with content undeniably. What our children were expecting was something different from what they regularly see on the TV. “There is no fight with magic pawaar, no hero, no bad, no rangers, no pawaar punch”! We bought them few more packets of achapot with free toys.
FOOTNOTE: there have been attempts from some forces to dictate terms in art, that a specific genre should be followed. This is allowed and that is not allowed. A practice very much evident in performing art, which is in a way hurdle to wholesome growth of the art form, LeipungNingthou calls it, “angaang poktringaida eepaan haanna thadokpa”.