global warming and childhood

      How many of us have smiled and laughed when relating childhood antics to friends and children? I guess, all of us...provided they are incidents you can retell :) And the place where we spent those precious days, leave an indelible mark in our memory.
      But a report in yesterday's TOI  of Delhi edition jolted me from one such reverie. According to the report, many low lying areas like Vellachary, Kotturpuram of Chennai, will nowhere be on the map in fifty years time! Something snapped in me.

     Part of my childhood and most parts of my adolescence was spent at Kotturpuram. The gang of the neighbourhood always played in the park adjacent to our building...come what may...rain or sunshine (hardly any of the former and overdose of the latter). We had many a moonlit dinners on the terraces of the buildings and organised fete... just us, the kids of the block. Playing Rounders was the high point of the evening games in the park. Rounders was a rudimentary baseball where we used the hand in place of the baseball bat.And yes, we have had our share of breaking people's window panes which, in some cases, we had to repay with our pocket-money( that pinched!)                                                                                                                            One such evening, we must have been playing either Rounders or Seven Stones( Pitthu), when we heard the sound of shattering glass. All the groups of children playing in the vicinity stopped in their tacks, for we didn't know which one of us was it. As luck would have it, it was Us that  day!All hell broke loose when we realized it was Female's window pane! Now I don't remember why we honoured her with the name, considering she was a female. It must have been one of those casualties of childhood... Probably the fact that she was always ranting at us even after we had long gone home, must have helped us, to arrive at such a nomenclature.On that fateful day, female was sitting on her throne in the loo,  when our naughty ball broke that very window pane!!We ran helter-skelter to hide at our homes. And female, that evening, ranted like never before... Now when I think of it, we should give her a box of chocolates, like they show in the cadbury's commercial,for all the nuisance we must have been.            
            Kotturpuram, gave my brother and I, the freedom to grow and explore our childhood. We cycled down, on its then wide road, to IIT campus where another set of friends were there. With them we explored the IIT jungle with impromptu picnics, treasure hunts, enjoyed a good movie( Sound Of Music, Chitty chitty Bang Bang etc) at the Open Air Theatre...
       And this very Kotturpuram, they say, will be submerged in fifty years time. The Kotturpuram, that is testimony of our childhood. And there are many such places, which I am sure has many memories for you all that will meet the same end...And I am not talking of faraway Maldives, Mauritious and any other exotic landscape...thanks to Man's insatiable greed...