E-Paper
Global Village Idiot: Stamping around the world to get to the Olympics
Of course today (July 23, 2021), is the scheduled opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, an event that we as a family are looking forward to. We have keen interest in a wide spectrum of sports from equestrian events and swimming to athletics, archery, gymnastics, shooting, basketball, tennis, wrestling, badminton, table tennis, and fencing among others
So Wednesday morning at breakfast, we were playing Atlas. The kids play Atlas quite often - usually at meal times - and it’s a great way to train memory and learn about the world in an enjoyable manner. We join in from time to time.
It’s a pretty straightforward game: one player starts with the name of a country or city and the next player names another country starting with the last letter of the previous country name. So, if I begin with ‘Denmark’, the next player has to name a place starting with ‘K’. We usually allow names of continents, oceans, rivers and states as well (on days when the game goes long, we debate whether to allow district and village names). As the game progresses it gets pretty intense since one cannot repeat any place name … and conversations do get heated with frequent aspersions cast on made-up place names.
And so it was on Wednesday that I came up with Umm Al Quwain and everyone immediately pounced, wondering if there was such a place. Thankfully I had proof handy: stamps from Umm Al Quwain, one of the emirates of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The stamps featured winners of events from the 1972 Winter Olympics.
Soon enough there was uproar over Liechtenstein and then Brunei. And sure enough, I had stamps from both these countries (that’s how I had learnt about them in the first place). Three new names in a row piqued the curiosity of the kids and thus it transpired that we spent Wednesday evening reviewing my stamp collection and finding answers to questions like:
“Where is Suriname?”
“What is a stamp?”
“So Andorra is a country? And not Pandora’s cousin?!”
“What is a letter?”
“So when you were growing up did pigeons carry your messages?”
“Are there any triangle stamps? What about circle-shaped stamps?”
“Has the Olympics been held in Japan before?”
I started collecting stamps when I was around 7-years old. I found the coloured bits of paper on envelopes fascinating and used to cut out the stamps and keep them in a paper envelope. The information on the stamps was enough to drive my imagination and spur me onto long quests of discovery. Before long, I found that Mrs Bhosale - our neighbour - had family in foreign lands and that they wrote her letters frequently. Never a shy kid when it came to matters of my interest, I asked the question and that’s how I acquired my first 50 foreign stamps - from Bhosale aunty’s letters. It wasn’t long before I discovered that many other neighbours had family overseas and their polite offering of “you can have them if you want”, was invariably rewarded with me sitting in their living room cutting out stamps from their envelopes. My collection grew exponentially, as did my understanding of the world and the many wonders in it. Leaders, inventions, world organisations, important historic events, languages, people, farming techniques, science, art, wildlife, sports… stamps introduced me to it all. In fact, I first heard of the Olympics from a series of stamps from San Marino. (It was soon after that my father bought me a book on the Olympics published by the National Book Trust).
And so on Wednesday we flipped through the collection and learnt that Japan had hosted the 1964 Summer Olympics (in Tokyo) and the 1972 Winter Olympics (in Sapporo). With a little bit of reading up, we discovered that Japan had also hosted the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano.
Of course today (July 23, 2021), is the scheduled opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, an event that we as a family are looking forward to. We have keen interest in a wide spectrum of sports from equestrian events and swimming to athletics, archery, gymnastics, shooting, basketball, tennis, wrestling, badminton, table tennis, and fencing among others.
Swimming is the big draw for us, given that we have two champion (school and club level) swimmers in the family and two budding swimmers. I am the only one who is an embarrassment in the pool, but I make up for that with my certificates and trophies in soccer, table tennis and athletics. None of us are gymnasts, but we love rooting for all participants. India has a large contingent at the Games this year and I’m looking forward to the competitions.
It’s a pity we can’t be cavalier and out and about during Olympics, due to the pandemic. Historically, people play more sports and take part in more physical activity during global sporting events. We have factored in work and school commitments and planned all our free time around the Tokyo Olympics for the next three weeks. It also seems likely that we will be snorkelling through our coin collection and exploring further the stamp albums and first-day covers in a bid to unearth more tidbits of intriguing historical information about the world we live in.
Am quite sure we will also have our own championship of Atlas to address the competitive spirit in all of us.
PS: With regards to Atlas, the trick is to trap your opponents into a cycle of place names starting with ‘A’. Why? Because most place names starting with ‘A’ also end with ‘A’ and unless you know the world Atlas really well, it becomes a pressure point to find yet another place name starting with ‘A’!
