AFOVA New Letter 2 of Year 2021

Section 6 - Memoirs CV 2 No. 02 / 2021 Page 169 of 332 guessing the latter was priced higher. Placing of the sharper end of a nail at the bottom, with its sturdy head safely embedded into the narrowing body of the device is one of the most intricate operations I have witnessed in this business of selling not just decorative tops, but very agile and functional pieces that are competition ready. The Strings used for spinning the tops came in a multitude of colours too, very bright and very Indian! A violet was often violent, but never ‘purple’, so to speak. Soft ‘English’ colours had no place in this domain! On the marbles front, there were two classes too – the working model and the decorative ones, with the former being used to play the rough and tough game on ground and the latter was always given away as the stakes to the winner. At the end of the kite season, those very shops stocked "Bambarams" with colorful tops, as well as marbles of different sizes. Their colourful display used to attract even the uninitiated towards those shops, to the utter chagrin of the shop keepers who were interested in doing brisk business rather than entertaining simple gazers with no intention of buying their wares. The Colourful World of Match Box Labels The ‘stakes’ in these street games are not always marbles. There was also a kind of paper currency doing the rounds in the form of “Match Box Labels”. The printing presses of Sivakasi worked overtime and produced loads of these colourful labels, and sold them in bulk. The commonplace labels were sold in packs of 100 and 500, while the rare ones were given the respect of a collector’s item and enjoyed special packing comparable to Philately. While the manufacturers of matches were very few in number, the variety of the labels printed was in thousands. The myriad pictures appearing on the labels and the colourful combinations were attractive enough to be traded as prize money. The commonly available labels had a low value, but the rare ones demanded high prices in the ‘stakes’ market. The readers are encouraged to do a Google search on “Match Box Labels” to get a glimpse of this colourful world that existed during the sixtees and seventees. Probably even now.