To Scoubidou or not!

My daughters were nagging me for some time to get them Scooby doo which I later realised was spelt scoubidou. Thinking it was either a cartoon channel subscription or an app for a game to be played on one of those tabs that needed to be downloaded for a price, I refused, not for the money but for the reason that I had enough of them walking around like zombies with their gadgets, banging into stuff at home and the annoying update notification tone from the installed Subway surfers and Temple Run apps waking me up in the middle of the night.

I bluntly refused without even giving them an ear on what it was. Today I happened to see the stuff and was flabbergasted. It was just lengths of multi coloured PVC strips. I googled it immediately, what else can a retard like me do to find more about what my children confront me with every day. I found out that it was a game that came into existence in the 1950’s that taught kids craft, the kids these days know KRAFT the Cheese not CRAFT as an art.

This took me back a few decades when as a kid I used to visit my grandparents in Kerala who lived in a village and I from Madras would visit them every summer. I used to be fascinated by the creativity of the kids there who would intertwine strips drawn out from coconut tree leaves. They used to make great stuff from that, balls to play cricket with, boats, figurines of snakes to scare people, puppets accompanied by skilful ventriloquism to embarrass people, all this just by artfully interlocking / intertwining any flexible stuff that they could lay their hands on.

My initiation to automobile engineering happened too at that age and thanks to these kids who taught me that. The steering rod was the trunk of a tapioca plant stem which was light, the axle was a combination of a strong piece of stick from the coconut tree leaf passing through a papaya stalk that was hollow, the wheels were circular pieces from used up Bata flip flops measured and cut without the use of a compass or other engineering drawing fundamentals. The hub that prevented the wheel from slipping off was the very small tender coconuts that fell off the bunch, the under privileged ones who fell short of making it to the big league of nuts, in this case the mother of all nuts, the coconut. These tender miniature coconuts would also serve as wheels in places where even worn out flip flops was hard to find. Green technology in all its sense.

Exactly 64 years later Scoubidou suddenly makes its appearance as the most popular game among kids, and I’m happy for that since its been a long time a game has caught the imagination of kids that doesn’t come in the form of an app. This is something that they have to be hands on rather than straining their retinas staring into pixelated screens of these tabs. Wish more games like this make an appearance to keep kids away from the virtual world.

Scoubidou is a simple game that is sold as multi-coloured PVC strips that can be used to make different things by interlocking them in different shapes and forms which can be crafted to a key chain, a snake, a basket. It comes with instructions on the different knots that they can try. In other words they have brought back the craft of basket weaving and knitting back in vogue.The different kinds of knots are box stitch, the square stitch is the most common knot used in making key chains. A double square (or triple) stitch can be made using four strings, thus doubling the size of the keychain made, Spiral knot, Double spiral, Cobra stitch, The Chinese Staircase, The Butterfly stitch, Super-16 Square etc.

Let me quickly get them a kit before an app for all these knots or the game itself surfaces and they start virtually trying them.

What they don’t realize is that the only knot that doesn’t make a difference either virtually or in reality is the nuptial knot because the difficulty level remains the same.

For the uninitiated here is the link where you can read about Scoubidou