Joy of Making Indian Toys

Today, children are inundated with expensive toys. Parents seem to be in a hurry to buy the latest toys with flashing lights and sounds.

Pedagogic learning is now associated with gloss and gleam. Children play with such toys for a while and then they throw them away. Instant gratification, instant forgetfulness seems to be the norm.

Children need large chunks of time to play and mess around with things they like. This is how they construct their own knowledge patterns.

According to Rabindranath Tagore, the best toys are those which are innately incomplete and which a child completes with her participation.

As a child, my daughter was gifted many expensive toys. But she was happiest playing with spoons and pots in the kitchen.

Whenever we broke a coconut to make chutney we would preserve all the pieces of the hardwood in the washed plastic milk bag.

This article recently published in The Times of India about the Joy of Making Indian Toys and the book of the same name – especially those of you who have small children:

This is the website of the author