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K Thilagarajan spent two days with an old coconut tree climber at Sholavandan learning to make a “bug that buzzes”. The 50-year-old school teacher from Madurai is a populariser of toys made from palm and coconut leaves. He travels across the State sharing with children the joys of making fans, fish, birds, rattles, flowers, animals… “The idea is to make children work with delicate material,” he says.
“Once they create something on their own, they will be inclined to give it away to someone else,” he adds. “They will tend to listen, tell stories through the toys, and eventually, take over from me.”
The philosophy behind his toys is to engage little hands with something organic that also stimulates the mind. “They learn science through these toys,” he explains. A bend here or a twist there can alter the entire design; a tiny fold can make an insect sing and a fan fly. Thilagarajan is a happy man when he sits surrounded by children, each engrossed in a toy of her own, forgetting his presence.
It takes a toy of great value to suck a child completely into its world. The rainbow stacker does just that. Popularised by social media over the past few years, it consists of a set of wooden arches of various colours. It is open-ended — there are countless ways with which a child can use it. Woodbee Toys makes the stackers in beech wood with non-toxic colours. The company has a factory near Vellore and sells through its Instagram page woodbeetoys_official. “We started in November 2020 and have 45 toys with 15 more in the making,” says K Suganya, who handles marketing.
Woodbee’s toy philosophy borrows from Waldorf’s principle: their toys are simple and encourage free play. Toy designer K Kokila, who is Suganya’s mother-in-law has also come up with her own ideas: their trilinks and math rods, for instance.
“Run, or I will shoot!,” calls out a little girl, charging out of a room with a toy gun; two boys are engaged in a dramatic plastic sword fight: scenes quite harmless in a typical household, one would think. But when did guns, knives, and swords find their way into children’s toys? Should violence be part of children’s lives, wonders Subid, a civil engineer who is trained in Product Design at IIT Delhi. His Ahimsa toys, based on Gandhi’s principle of non-violence, speak of play in a gentle way so as to not stir even a leaf.
Ahimsa toys are similar to toy innovator Arvind Gupta’s toys from trash. But while Arvind’s toys teach science through everyday objects, ahimsa toys are all about “freedom, self-reliance, and sharing”. “Children do not need toys,” feels Subid, who has written Ahimsa Toys (Thannaram publications), a book with step-by-step instructions to make the toys. “All they need is freedom to play,” he says. “For them, every activity is play, and through that, they learn life.”
Subid feels children can play endlessly without any object to keep them engaged, only if adults do not interfere. Ahimsa toys show that the greatest of joys can come from the simplest of things. “My focus is not science experiments,” says Subid. “Children are fed up with science,” he adds. The focus, is rather on ‘unlearning’. “My philosophy is that children come from heaven; we only have to observe them to learn from them.”
To Arvind, the best toy is that which can be used over and over again. “Take Lego, for instance,” he says. “It is a great toy, but sadly, is not accessible to many children.” His toys from trash teach children not just science, but show them the immense possibilities ordinary materials hold. “An old CD, with a marble stuck in between, makes for the greatest top,” says Arvind. “It keeps spinning for two minutes.”
Newspapers too are fun to play with. “A dozen types of caps can be made with them,” says Arvind. “Look at your own garbage bin and not at what the Chinese or Germans or Americans are making,” he adds.
The market is filled with loud and flashy plastic toys that create a racket, states Arvind, speaking of “expensive products that come in boxes more expensive than the toy itself”. He adds, “When children are happy, there will be peace in the world… And for children to be happy, we need to make toys affordable.”
Excerpted from https://www.thehindu.com/society/when-toys-teach-non-violence-and-a-new-way-of-life/article37436268.ece