Of Childhood and toys

Speaking to my niece the other day I got updated on the latest object of fascination of kids nowadays - beyblades. And it prompted me to look it up in the net. - No access to kids of any sorts where I stay.

Well.... I found the whole thing to be too complicated for my understanding (though I wouldn't like to comment too much on that). It was the same with Pokemon a few years earlier. Having to babysit my nephews and nieces many times I made it a point to watch "Powerpuff Girls" and "Dexter's laboratory" even when my peer group watched "Baywatch" and "X-Files"!! So far so good. But when they got tired of these "silly" cartoons and moved on to Pokemon, I somehow could not keep pace. In their myriad universes of heroes and villians I lost myself and slowly found myself as an "alien in an unknown land".

Wasn't it much simpler when we were children.

Our He-Man's and GI Joe's were infinitely simpler than these new fangled toys. I still remember how we used to look in envy to those kids who had purchased a new "He-Man" action figure.

One of my neighbourhood guys (was staying in posh West Delhi those days) had got an entire Castle Grayskull with almost all the figures. Oh my god !!! I used to hate him for that.


As for me, I found solace in the TV series and the comic books - Those days we used to get mini comic books, four of them for six rupees. I must have bought around twenty of them.

And then came GI Joe and democracy. Much cheaper and infinitely more flexible than the He-Men, GI Joe also had funky accessories like backsacks and guns which made them all the more"cool". I remember my first one "Snow Job"

and the next one "Gung Ho".

After that it became a race to who will have the largest number of figures and action vehicles and battleground modules and board games and so on and so forth.

Alas like all good things this also did not last forever.

It was soon replaced by Street Hawk - " The Man The Machine ....Street Hawk".

Fuelled by the success of the tv show, Funskool (who had earlier marketed action figures of GI Joe and tasted success) launched an action figure of The Eponymous Hero.

So there we were, riding Street Hawk on his bike and singing the theme music.
Ahaaa...those were the days.

Pretty uncluttered and uncomplicated...right.

After then we discovered audio cassettes, T-Series and Gulshan Kumar.
That of course, is another story.