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Summer memories

We have an internal social networking tool at work. A parent started a thread asking about camps and other summer activities for kids. One of my co-workers said something like below (as a joke):

"Put them in the backyard in the morning. Lock the door. Put out sandwiches at noon. Hose them down in the evening with your garden hose"..

That turned into people mentioning free range kids. Of course, in America there's some sophisticated sounding terminology for everything, but I would have called this "a typical childhood in India".

This got me reminiscing about my childhood summer vacations growing up in Hosur, in the 80s. The "hose them down with the garden hose" part wasn't too far from some part of my summer experience between the age of  7 to 12.

Summer vacation started around mid April. My grandparents lived with us, and me and my sister couldn't wait for summer to start each year. The youngest of our cousins R lived in town. My other cousins A1, A2, V, and B would travel by an overnight bus to Hosur from Madras. They usually came accompanied by their parents, who left after a couple of days leaving them to spend about a month at our house in Hosur. We had no educational activities, sports classes or any sort of schedule for those two months of summer.

My memories of summer activities from those years:

  • Hide and seek around the neighborhood. 
  • Go exploring around some hills near where we lived that were covered with weedy grasses. There were probably snakes all around but ignorance is bliss so we made it out okay.
  • We didn't have bicycles until we were much older, so we would hire a rickety old bike for 1Rupee an hour in the evenings to ride them around the neighborhood. 
  • Watch movies on a VCR. We pretty much didn't pay attention to a film rating system if there was any, so most movies were grossly violent and age inappropriate. In the earlier days it was mostly Tamil or Hindi movies, until the early 90s when we could get access to Hollywood movies. (I didn't realize this at the time because I was a kid, but you could say that without Narasimha Rao's liberalization policies initiated around that time, I would have grown up not knowing TV shows like Wonder Years, and not realizing that MTV was a thing). 
  • Barbecue - We grew up vegetarian. Our version of a "summer barbecue" was gathering a bunch of old newspapers, setting fire to it, and throwing some potatoes set between two stones in the middle of the fire. Eventually the fire would die out, and sometimes the potatoes were cooked, sometimes not. Either way, we would eat them with salt and chilli powder.  I can't believe now that we did this without any adult supervision. Our grandparents would yell out "be careful, don't set the trees on fire", but other that that we were on our own. 
  • The first time we all saw a Madonna music video, we were so fascinated and hooked. We watched a tape of her music videos over and over again.
  • When MTV was accessible in India over cable TV, R was still only around 7. Whenever a Britney Spears song would come on, one of us would cover his eyes very punctiliously. We missed it one time, and "Baby one more time" was on. He asked us if Britney Spears was very poor, because her skirt for school was cut in half. Yeah, we didn't know what a miniskirt was. 
  • A1 was very passionate about dancing, and would make up routines for us. I hated it, and felt very self conscious because  I had no natural inclination for dancing. Still, we put together a routine for my aunt who also lived with us, to celebrate her birthday. 
  • A2 would translate English and Hindi songs into Tamil, with hilarious results. He would still sing them loudly around the house. 
  • Water problems - We regularly lost running water in the summer in the house. In the late afternoon, a water lorry would come by. Some of us would go out dressed in under-clothes, with a bar soap and have the guy in the lorry hose us with water. We would take a shower right there in the street and get hosed back to wash off the soap, 
So yeah, I've actually been a free range kid and had all sorts of summer fun.

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