Antakshari, anyone?

Antakshari – the game of songs. This is a colourful game that reminds me of my childhood more than any other game does. Those years in school spent playing sing-songs, competing with your friends in showing who-knows-more or rather who can remember most from the song reservoir. We used to do this almost every day and that too with the same bunch of people. I am not much of a singer but this game hardly requires you to have at that great voice anyways. As far as I can remember, we used to be quite competitive in this. However, since we would do this in recess or mostly in our way back home after school, there would seldom be a winner. There wouldn’t be enough time to crown the victorious or most of the time; we would just let the game go, leaving our competitiveness along the way.

Gone are those school days now. We still like to indulge in this game sometimes, however all of us have either run out of time or simply grown out of the youthfulness to involve ourselves in the frivolity that this game represents. But whenever we do find us time or the right group of people to play along, I am compelled to admit that as much as it acts as a happy reminder of those good old days, it seems to be trapped in a certain era of time. Meaning, we seem to sing the same set of songs....always. There is no doubt that we have lived many years to have added scores of new songs to our playlist but our “Antakshari-reservoir” remains the same. No matter who we play this game with, we always end up singing the same songs. It may sound odd, and we might wonder why our brains just stop to think of any new songs. Unless you are fond of singing and you know the lyrics to all the new songs, I know you fall in that category of people who has played this game enough in his/her childhood to remember the lyrics of the songs from so long ago and somehow are unable to decide what this new song that you are really fond of begins with.

At least that is the category of people that I fall into and I have had enough encounters with people like me to have made me to reach this conclusion. Last time I played this game with my girls atop an elephant in Chitwan(real hush-hush so as to not disturb the “wildlife”), we made a rule: if we manage to sing outside of the “reservoir” we get extra point. We did act all tough and competitive in the beginning, trying to think of every new song that we could. But in the end we decided, all we wanted was to sing and pretend we were still children trying to have fun in this busy world. As for getting extra points, we need not try so hard; it was a fair game. We did manage to recall a few new songs but that proved to be harder than recalling songs from a decade ago so we just gave up.

After pondering on this for a while, I was not sure if I wanted to take this game out of my childhood, broaden the horizon, learn a few more songs, make it more colourful and get competitive for real. Now I know that no, I do not want to do that. I do not know about others but for me, it will stay where it is. Happily at its rightful place. A jolly reminder of a simple life when panic was hearing rival-friends say the daunting tick-tick-one, tick-tick-two.., pride was remembering a song starting from a nasty letter, satisfaction was seeing rivals cursing themselves trying to recall a song, happiness was just singing and enjoying the company of friends.