The kid in me :)

Well so the earlier post was all about cribs and complaints and before you conclude anything about anything.. i thought it would be better to add certain very "close to me" things which come out whenever i am in the best of my spirits.. and here, I would be taking some time to cherish those old (read: very old, I wasnt even in 3rd std then) distant memories that crop up time and again, and to say the least, I love re-living them whenever and wherever possible... then on reading further you shall encounter that the "wherever" is not "wherever" actually.

So i was a curious kid and i am sure that everyone is/was.. but i had special curiosity towards things which some people (cute cuddly nice sweet as kids) would nearly puke at the thought of.. creatures like baby frogs, toads, crabs, lizards, praying-mantis, dragonflies, moths, butterflies, grass-hoppers and tadpoles (mind you tadpoles look very different from frogs.. if you weren't curious and observant enough as a kid one could easily have cooked one for you and given you on a platter as a fried baby fish, i guess you got it.. they look very much like baby fishes).

I was an avid fan of crabs and frogs, indulge me and i can teach you how to catch and hold a crab (without harming it) so that it doesnt hurt you... its really nice to let baby crabs walk over your palm or hands with the tickling sensation that runs up your spine :).

About the art of catching crabs, the ones around me used to live either in holes in the ground or the small nallahs that carried the rainwater (they had small fishes as well).

Now, for the ones living in the holes we used to lure them up with a twig of grass or earthworms and then when they are almost on the surface we used to block their holes poking sticks into the ground and through their holes so that they couldnt go in.. and then catching was "art" that cannot be put in words :P. For the ones that lived in the nallahs, it was an eagle eye scan followed by a quick claw-fist pounce to pull them out of the water without hurting them. Sometimes for the bigger ones we even tied string around their claws and dragged them around (i know this is barbaric but that was it and nothing more, they were untied and let go later)

Catching frogs is a bit tricky business though, you venture close enough thinking that you have concealed your presence to the extent possible feeling great that all the stealth tricks that you have learnt from other kids on the block and from "wildlife expedition" on DD-2 are eventually paying off and that you have almost made the catch of the day, that you just realize that it has actually leaped feets ahead of you. Not just that, if you ever tried to catch them with bare hands they would leave some slippery liquid, hence we used newspapers to catch them as that absorbed the ooze... phew!!

I can go on and on about the adventures and expedition but for the time i will save the remaining stories of the rabbit we had that used to drink tea, pigeons that became so familiar that they used to come and mess with our bed and the tortoise that terrorized my sister so much that my parents gave it off before i came from school and then i cried the whole night :(... the way my sister smashed my head against a rough wall, when in a "ghar-ghar" game i played the role of a kid who always refused to take any medicines and she was the mother whose role was to make me drink it no matter what.. about the "water-slides" game that we used to play in the big rainwater nallah :P (obviously secrets that my parents still dont know) for the next post :).

Please comment if you have read it :).