Sunday, December 30, 2018

Train travel

Train......Ku chikku bhukku.. We always used to get excited to travel by train when we were young.. At the age of four or five, we friends used to hold eachother to form a train and move around in the room making the sound of a train. Train travel is fun at all ages. I remember traveling to my native place during school vacation, every year with my mom in train and getting stuck to the window, watching trees, animals grazing the farm, huts where we never had a chance to stay and wondering how people happily sheltered inside the hut with a special roof, unlike our houses. I have enjoyed watching at the way water gushes out from the pipes for irrigation with a thought why water never gushed out like that in our taps in the city. Making friends for a very short period, playing words buildings, fighting with mom to get all that is sold on the train having an appetite of a bhakasura. In the end, sadly getting down at our destination by force and waiting for another travel by train. Every bit of train travel was enjoyable in its own ways indeed.

Today, when I travel by train, I can see how times have changed now and the way kids get bugged up with the travel. The habit of seeing through the windows has bygone. Rather, they get bored and even if you ask them to watch at the running trees, animals etc, they simply say it's too boring and are always ready to take their mobiles, ipads, tablet etc and play with it. The trend is that parents have to download a few movies or cartoons so that they can kill their time watching them on the train. Kids eagerly wait for their destination to arrive. Technology has replaced almost everything here and even the traditional way of play is almost unknown to today's generation kids. The only thing that the kids enjoy doing on the train is that they keep running inside the compartment from one corner to another banging their head here and there with the parents watching at them helplessly experiencing a skip of their heartbeat with every bang.

I am sure that, you friends can relate to all that I have written here and totally agree with me. As parents, shouldn't we teach our kids, what is truly fun and make them play in the real world than the virtual one. I know it is hard and tough to make them accept something without the involvement of technology in it. But, trying costs nothing. Isn't it?

Technology should be used more productively and when there is a real need. But, we have become addicts and are getting stuck to our mobiles, laptops, etc and losing our true self. Make kids understand that travel by train is fun without gadgets, eating food without mobile is healthier, talking to family members is more important than digging their faces into cell phones. Let us bring up awesome kids with values and not robots.



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