Hai...Kya Dinn the

I was at the New Delhi Railway Station last week after a long time and caught sight of something that was an integral part of my Summer Holidays. It was before Cartoon Network, Pogo, Disney etc. came into existence, when Summer Holidays meant travel to Naani’s house, enjoying the train journey, spending hours and hours pouring over…. COMICS – Chacha Chaudhary, Pinky, Angara, Nagraaj, Nandan, Champak and so many of them.

 

I went through the nostalgic journey into the  memory lanes and came out with those memorable dialogues – “ Jab Saabu ko gussa aata he to kahi jwalamukhi phat ta he” or Chacha Chaudhary ka dimaag computer se bhi tej chalta he” or “ Nagraj se koi bachh nai sakta” and another awesome piece was description of Angara : “ Bhaalu ki khaal, cheetah sa tej. Lomdi ka dimaag, n ullu ki ankhein…Angara jungle ka rakhwala”. I am sure each one of us has his/her favourite dialogues and characters in these comics. Those were the innocent days; fighting to read our favourite comics, arguing with the shopkeeper that how dare he give my favourite one to someone else, loving the sight of those digests – Billu 3, Pinky 10, sharing the ones we had read and so on. Comics were a part of life and their characters loved with the sweetness of childhood.

A lot of these memories are centered around the visits to Naani’s House. Though sometimes, to show off that I was a serious reader, I would read a Champak or Nandan over others but would soon secretly regret my decision. This would lead to exerting authority over my cousins, as I am the eldest, to hand over their comics to me. There was this shop near my naani’s place which used to rent these comics – 50 paise a day for the thin ones and Rs. 2 for the digests. We would daily rush to the shop to get new ones and spend more than a hundred rupees in the week we stayed there, during Summer Holidays. The shopkeeper loved us and he would keep our favourites aside, after all we were his regular customers. All this came rushing back, making me slightly emotional for the days long ago, when comics filled the afternoons of long Summer Breaks.

 

Then I grew up, classics and thrillers replaced the comics , but at the moment I am craving to get my hands on any of the comics to recapture those days.