Late into my childhood — though one can never be sure whether one’s childhood has actually ended — I used to think of Siliguri interchangeably with the name of this house that I hadn’t ever been to. It was called “Khela Ghar”. Whose house it might have been or what kind of games were played there did not occur to us as children. We took that as shorthand for both what our town and our life was — a khela ghar (a house for play). My 12-year-old nephew now goes to Khela Ghar thrice a week — not to play but for English tuitions in the evening. In this difference, between the Khela Ghar of my childhood and his, is an index of what has changed in the emotional energy of a country.
I wanted to believe that my generation had managed to dodge the lathi charge of the slogan “aaram haram hai” that damaged my father’s generation, whose conversations with their children involve asking them about the work done and the work that remains to be done (I’m sure my father is not the only human version of a to-do list). But even they knew leisure, or at least sought it as the highest form of fantasy, stealing the afternoon from their half-Saturday work lives and turning Sunday morning shopping into a gym of joy. They also had access to the surplus delight of that pocket money-like expression — “overtime”, working beyond their allotted work hours for extra money.
Now we are in the middle of a work epidemic — Prime Minister Modi apparently sleeps for only 3.5 hours; Narayana Murthy believes that Indians should give at least 70 hours of their week to the nation; Indians working in the corporate sector chase targets and deadlines in their sleep; students and their parents are living to new units of time, semester for the student, financial quarter for their parents.
Recently, when school holidays were declared to protect students from a heat wave, the response was a mix of worry and anger — worry for the children losing out on learning time, suppressed rage and sarcasm directed against teachers for being indulged with extra salaried holidays. How could someone be paid for “free time”? What these critics don’t realise is that if they were to be given this time — “free time”, as the phrase goes, as if implying that this is either time that wants to live outside the capitalist economy or it is time itself that is seeking freedom — they wouldn’t know what to do with it. When my students ask about summer internships and I suggest they enjoy doing nothing, most of them say that they feel nervous and empty on a day that does not include ordered time, schedules and submission deadlines.
Rabindranath Tagore recognised this, that without chhutti or leisure, we might end up becoming Macaulay’s clerks, hoovers working mindlessly all day. (Express File)
Rabindranath Tagore recognised this, that without chhutti or leisure, we might end up becoming Macaulay’s clerks, hoovers working mindlessly all day. “Ma go, aamaye chhooti dite bol, shokal thheke porechhi je mela/ Aekhon aami tomar gharey boshey korbo shudhu pora-pora khela” (Ma, please ask them to give me a break, I’ve studied a lot since morning, now I’ll sit in your room and play read). The poem is tellingly called ‘Proshno’, meaning “question”. The child, weary of being chained to a regime of reading, wants release from that space, but, more importantly, from that chromosome of time — he is seeking rest time over “arrest” time, capitalist time.
By “khela”, I do not mean only a child’s game. Khela is related to leela, that untranslatable word that holds in it the sense of divine play, joy, beauty and grace. Not the arrogance of “khela hawbey” of electoral slogans, it is the playfulness of multiple selves, of Krishna who can be a child stealing makkhan and Arjuna’s charioteer-philosopher. The Bhagavad Gita couldn’t have been created in parliament or in an office meeting. This time to talk and discuss the world, like Krishna and Arjuna did, outside the battlefield, their workplace, seemed to me, at that young age, not very different from my father and neighbourhood uncles chatting about the football score and destiny.
This kind of khela characterised the provincial pulse and impulse: In Ruskin Bond’s story, ‘The Blue Umbrella’, it is the childish desire for the blue umbrella, not just by the little girl Binya but by adults, including the local businessman Ram Bharosa, who pursues it like an obsessed child; in the TV series Panchayat it is a swivel chair in the village panchayat office of Phulera that a bridegroom comes to fancy, even though he has no use for it. The passion for the blue umbrella and the chair with wheels allows the adults their unconscious desire for khela — it humanises these annoying men.
The need for khela that exists outside militant religion and militant atheism marked our architecture once — the balcao in Goa, the rawk in Bengal, for instance, spaces that allowed for rest and community. Now we live on a treadmill, to burn until burnout, from which neither philosophy nor scientific discovery nor joy can ever be produced.
