Toys for boys. An Egyptian mummy, too.

A favourite childhood toy I remember vividly was a chutney green road roller cast out of metal. It had a tall chimney. It was powered by a spring-loaded clockwork wind-up engine. You could remove the key before you put it down to do its backward and forward road rolling routine. I have a feeling I had persuaded my father to buy it for me from the famous Lucky Toy Mart at Crawford Market. I also used to play with a clockwork train set - green as well - pulled by a 'coal-fired' replica engine and railroad sections, straight as well as curved. I had managed to acquire from I don't remember where quite a few more such sections. I used to set up an entire journey track with a gradient and a bridge using bits and pieces of other toys like wooden house building sections. No readymade layout for me like the one I see Armaan and Anika playing with! My Meccano set, a modest No. 2 or No. 3, had been purchased from Whiteway Laidlaw, the pucca Brit department store near Flora Fountain. (Its premises were later taken over by the Khadi & Gramodyog Commission and now houses the Khadi Bhandar.) I used to make windmills and other movable toys with my Meccano set and run them with a miniature battery-powered motor they used to sell at the time. I also had a pink coloured nicely sculpted wooden street lamp with a tiny bulb. I remember using a flat Everready battery to light it up. It was a regular part of my improvised railroad layout. Once, during a Navi Wadi jatra (fair) for our family deity, Maheshwari, I bought myself a plastic 'coffin' with a plastic Egyptian 'mummy' lying flat in it. So tiny was this toy that I could easily hold it in my childish palm. In the coffin's false bottom was hidden a magnet - as also inside the mummy. When you gave the coffin a nudge, the magnet would shift causing the mummy to rise. It was applied magnetism and polarity at their best. I thought it was powerful magic, though, and paid the toy seller ten rupees instead of the real price of five rupees for it. (In short, I did not haggle.) When the truth was out, one of my cousins accompanied me to the toy shop the very next day and managed to get back the extra five rupees with a combination of cajoling and mild threats. I watched this drama with a red face standing far from centre stage and thinking the fuss was uncalled for. Powerful magic was supposed to be worth a lot, wasn't it?

Are Page Three lions inveterate lady killers?

If you write well, does it automatically make you a lady killer? The case of Salman Rushdie makes me want to almost believe in the heresy. Also, my limited experience as a fairly successful copywriter supports the theory. Somehow, people associate word conjuring with magic. Then, they hypnotize themselves into believing that the wielder of such arcane power must be a Pied Piper to the opposite sex. Sex appeal is to the mind of the believer what beauty is to the eye of the beholder, after all. The Page Three coverage of the Rushdie goings-on when he was last in Bombay (not Mumbai – not even when pronounced “Moom-baa-ee” in the FM deejay style) threw up some unwittingly tongue-in-cheek revelations. I wondered, for instance, what hardbound first editions (of Rushdie, I take it – and already autographed!) “strategically placed in the dining area” were meant to be doing at an intimate dinner in his honour (as the fly-on-the-ceiling report put it). Were they doubling as first edition coasters, pray tell? Or, were they a sly dry run for the secret Christie innovation, The Supper Auction – inspired by, I suspect, The Supper Theatre? Also, the intriguing reference to Padmalakshmi (who one report described as “draped around” Rushdie at the same do) complaining to Dé: “I hardly get to spend time with my boyfriend”. Dé added: “The boyfriend smiles indulgently.” Was the indulgence, his fawning hagiographer never clarified, aimed at her girlish tendency to tell little white lies so blatantly? Or, at the fact of the life lived on Page Three that he was the reigning Lion King in Bombay’s Page Three jungle and Padmalakshmi didn’t get ‘it’ (neither the attention nor the point)? And, while Bombay and Madras (not Chennai) had to be satisfied with Rushdie and Padmalakshmi, New Delhi had a galaxy of NRIs and POIOs attending a mega confab and being regaled by the President himself. In the honour list was Shashi Tharoor, senior UN official and author of the then ‘just published’ Nehru, The Invention of India. Nehru was fond of big dams to build which the Indian State callously reduced to penury farmers and Adivasis who had little or no land and banished them from the Indian mainstream. Now globalisation and consumerism have further reinforced the process. The identity equation of today reads: “I consume. Therefore, I am.” Ironic, isn’t it? (P.S.: It’s good to know that the marginalized of the world now have the World Social Forum speaking on their behalf.) http://www.shashitharoor.com/books/nehru.