Aankh Micholi

This is an answer. A reply. To what? (snigger) (more snigger) (finally a crooked smile).

People remember old days and say those were the good old days and they say now, things have gone corrupt. For example, the days when whole community had one television and people used to sit and watch serials together. There was sharing, there was brotherhood. But now we don't know who lives in the apartment one floor below us.

I who has never lived the community-television era; I who was brought up in an apartment with no knowledge of who lives in front of us or below us; I who understand that it would be good to have that community-television era camaraderie between folks; I, who at the same time, does not feel that there is anything wrong in not knowing your neighbor; I who see that people who blame the present and glorify the past were actually the ones who were given that past and are responsible for the present, those people refuse to acknowledge their hand in it.

Aankh-Micholi
It is a game where one person is blindfolded for sometime while others hide. Then that person removes the blindfold and it is his job to search others. A game were rules are designed to keep the seeker at disadvantage. A game where those who want to hide are given an upper hand.

I played that game a lot while i was growing up. There was a construction building in front of our apartment whose construction was stopped due to mysterious reasons. But before that they had erected some walls with walls making rooms and rooms making houses. Spaces were left for windows and doors. There was no roof. I and some of my friends, whom i knew where they lived, used to play there. The semi-constructed building was one of the coolest place to play that game - lots of places to hide, lots of ways to escape the seeker. And our parents sitting on balconies used to see us. Our parents who did not knew the kids with which their son was playing, who did not knew where their son's friend's parents lived. One of the beauties of Aankh-Micholi was that no one complained. Everyone knew that there will be a day when he has to be the seeker. And then he will have to do all the hard-work. But for the rest of the days, he was free to hide anywhere he wanted to.


But unlike the kids game, in the real aankh-micholi played by everyday people, some have found a way to always hide and others are now forced to always seek. Those simple round-robin rules do not apply in this modified but more real game. There are some mutations of the game as well where everyone is playing aankh-micholi aka everyone is seeking someone and hiding from someone at the same time. Sometimes a person seeks someone and hides from him at the same time. The last one is precisely what happens when in our modern day apartments. People play aankh-micholi with their neighbors where they hide from them as much as possible but internally seek them and wish for their friendship.


I can go on citing examples of how aankh-micholi is played by everyday people but it is my hope that one example is enough of an answer.

If you are wondering now, how do i fit into all this? The answer is very simple. I understand the game. I acknowledge that it is a game or you can say that it simplifies things for me if i put it in terms of a game. Shakespeare tried to put this game in terms of a play by writing "All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players". I, for one, on this world's stage, have chosen to play the part of audience. But this play calls for audience participation as well, sometimes. I will try to play the part of Sanjaya to our drithrashtra in his voluntary aankh-micholi but it is a big task.

So, this is an answer. Infact this is an observation made by me Shashi Raveendra. Aankh-micholi is the name given to this phenomenon of observation. And there are many things we need to observe. Stay tuned.

--thass