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A concerted effort is being made by Kreeda, an organisation in Chennai, to revive the traditional games of India so that they do not die out. Through such efforts, Kreeda also hopes to give children and adults an alternative to electronic entertainment and a means to bond, while also exploring ways to use such games to teach, impart life skills and facilitate corporate training. 

The Kreeda team is leaving no stone unturned in its initiative to research, document, revive and popularise traditional Indian games among today’s youngsters, which it sees as the ‘make or break generation’. “If the children and young adults of today do not become aware of these games and realise their manifold values, there is a real possibility that they will be lost forever,” says Vinita Siddhartha  ( 40), the promoter and brain behind Kreeda (meaning ‘play’ in Sanskrit).

Games that have got a new lease of life due to this initiative include Pallanguzhi (cup and shell); Paramapadam (steps to the highest place); and Adu Puli Attam (goat and tiger). While the first game involves moving shells or stones from one ‘cup’ to another in a wooden frame and improves motor skills, the second is a board game in which a dice is rolled and players progress to the higher numbers. This game has proved valuable in teaching mathematics. The third-Adu Puli Attam-is a strategy game, needing skill, concentration, analysis, anticipation and planning. In this game, the opponents’ strength has to be assessed and both defensive and offensive tactics have to be employed. It can be played by two people or two teams. According to the rules, the tigers have to kill the goats, while the goats have to encircle their predators. Interestingly, Adu Puli Attam is popular with corporate houses during training sessions.

The Principal, Mahatma Gandhi School, Madurai, says that at her school they use Paramapadam and Pallanguzhi to teach mathematics to children between the first and the eighth grade. “Apart from simple arithmetic, complex concepts like fractions, integers and even probability can be picked up,” says Kreeda’s Vinita. In a bid to ensure that the games become a part of mainstream teaching, the school authorities recently organised a workshop for teachers. The workshop focused on using traditional games for making class work enjoyable. The school also held a carnival for children and grandparents with the theme, ‘Forgotten Games’, in order to help them bond.

A gentle lady, who spoke to me, said that she recently bought Pallanguzhi. Not having played such games during childhood, Rama as well as her eight-year- old daughter soon became totally hooked on the game. Now, the duo prefers spending their free time playing Pallanguzhi together rather than watching TV .or going out. In fact she was so impressed with this traditional game that when she organised a theme party for her daughter’s birthday, she bought traditional games for’ the party and as give-away gifts. “Strategy, motor skills, creativity and knowledge-all these things improve by playing the games. I wanted to introduce culture to children in a way that they can enjoy it,” she smiles.

The traditional games also have other interesting uses. For example, Pallanguzhi, besides being a great way to strengthen mathematical concepts, is an excellent Braille game as it involves ‘touching and feeling’, reveals Vinita. In fact, an ayurveda centre, even prescribes the game to improve arthritis.

Vinita has received plenty of positive feedback from clients on her endeavour, which she started almost four- and-a-half-years ago. She recalls how a widow from Singapore telephoned her especially to tell her that Pallanguzhi had helped her fill the long lonely hours after her husband’s death. Another senior citizen from the US sent her an e-mail saying that he did not know ways in which to engage his grandchildren until he came across these traditional games in - a store in Chennai and brought them back with him.

Incidentally, Vinita decided to focus on this aspect after seeing her octogenarian grandmother have a great time playing these games with her young grandchildren. In fact she found out about many games mainly by talking to the elderly. This research is on-going. Interestingly, she and her team found that similar games are played in other parts of India, of course, with different rules. For instance, in Andhra Pradesh, Pallanguzhi is called Vamanaguntulu and Adu PuIi Attam is Bhagbakri. Similarly, Dayakattu of Tamil Nadu is Chaupad of North India.

To make the games contemporary and competitive, Kreeda has taken the most exciting rules from the different variations and formed its own set of rules for each. After the rules are drafted, the design, colour schemes and gaming elements such as coins, dice and so on are finalised. Every stage goes through a rigorous process of testing by the children.

Under-production games are given to children in neighbourhood schools and feedback is sought.

Once finalised, the games are packaged in eco-friendly material, keeping an eye on easy use and reuse. They are priced at affordable rates for customers from different economic backgrounds. Pallanguzhi, for instance, is priced between Rs 50 and Rs 500, depending on where it is stocked. Adu Puli Attam costs Rs 200. The games are available at bookshops and can also be ordered online at www.kreedagames.com.

According to Sheela (46) of Kreeda, there is a wide variety of indoor games from which to choose, such as Puliangottai (a tamarind seed game for motor skills); Chirmi (a seed and sand game); Kalanay Belanay (facilitates colour coordination); Kattam Vilayattu (uses the tic-tac-toe strategy); and Nakshatra Vilayattu (with the five-pointed star). Some of the outdoor games on sale are Pandi, Gilli Danda and Bambaram. 

Interestingly, the games also help go-getter executives climb the corporate ladder. Many leading companies, including Microsoft, ABN Amro, Orchid Chemicals, ING Vysya and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), now make use of these games for their staff, either for leadership training or as ‘de-stressers’.

Others have another unique use for these versatile games. Ravi Viswanathan (43), vice-president and head of Chennai operations, TCS, reveals that the company uses these games to showcase Indian culture to foreign clients. When demonstrations are organised with the help of the Kreeda staff, “many start playing and remark that the games stimulate the thinking capacity”. At times, they end up buying them to take back home.

EKA: India’s Super Computer

It is indeed a proud moment for India as Tata’s Eka supercomputer has made a spectacular entry as the most powerful computer in Asia. It has also been ranked as the fourth fastest in the world in the Top 500 ranking of supercomputers. What exactly is a supercomputer, you might well ask. Well, it is a computer that works at many times the speed of normal computer and has immense power compared to the normal computers that we see.

The main use of supercomputers is to perform highly calculation-intensive tasks.
They would include problems involving quantum physics, analysing data to forecast weather, research on climate and global warming, molecular modelling, etc. No wonder such computers are to be seen at top universities, or with the defence services, or at research laboratories. In fact, the Top500 list is released twice a year by the University of Tennessee, USA; Mannheim University, Germany, and at NERSC Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which together rank supercomputers worldwide. The test is based on the well respected Linpack N*N Benchmark, which checks processor speed and scalability.

The computer was built by Tata engineers at the Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) in Pune. It cost Rs 118.11 crore ($30million). The supercomputer was designed by Tata engineers and built with off-the-rack hardware sourced from Hewlett Packard that helped keep the cost of the supercomputer relatively low. Eka performs at 120 teraflops (trillion floating point calculations). The speed of floating point operations, or FLOPS, is of significance in scientific calculations, since it involves numbers with a floating or decimal point.

The top supercomputer, IBM’s Blue Gene/L, which has been installed in the US, beat others by a tremendous margin; it was almost three times faster than any other machine and four times faster than Eka. It performed at 478.2 teraflops. While American supercomputers have dominated the world, now there is a change in the pecking order, and India’s entry into the elite list is a matter of considerable significance.

Of course, a computer is only useful if it has applications that harness its power productively. It is here that Tata’s software muscle comes into play. CRL has said it is developing applications in as diverse areas as neural simulation, molecular simulation, computational fluid dynamics and crash simulation. S. Ramadorai, Chairman, CRL, highlighted the role of the system in earthquake and Tsunami modelling, as well as its usage in understanding the economy and designing drugs.
Earlier, Param supercomputers, developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), also in Pune, had propelled India’s entry into the supercomputer arena and Param Padma was ranked No. 171 on the Top500 list in 2003. The network-centric storage architecture of Param computers is based on state-of-the.-art Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies that ensure high performance, scalability and reliable storage.

There was a time when the US had refused to allow a Cray supercomputer to be sent to India. Today, India is in a position to not only make supercomputers but also export them, if it desires to do so. Eka means one in Sanskrit. It is the one that has showcased of India’s growing computer power to the world.