Chain-Chain - a childhood game!

When I was in school, we would get a 35 minutes recess. There was a routine we would strictly follow (at least on non-rainy days) –

• run down quickly and grab the usual sitting spot for our gang of friends
• finish our lunch-boxes (tiffin) quickly
• play some games on the playground/school campus

One such game that I fondly recall is what we called Chain-Chain (translated from Sakhali-Sakhali in Marathi) and you may recognize as Chain Tag. I’ll not get into describing the rules in this article, you can watch the embedded video or read the rules in the linked article.

On the surface, the game appears simple enough, all players must get tagged to finish playing.

But as with many simple things in life, that is only the tip of the iceberg.

Hidden in plain sight, within this game are lessons about unity, planning and co-ordination. Anyone who has played this game would agree, as the chain grows, the chances of the chain breaking also increase. And that can happen for many reasons - different players have different levels of stamina or different ends of the chain are going after different targets to tag! If the chain members don’t strategize appropriately, the remaining players will try to split the chain by baiting the 2 ends of the chain in opposite directions.

This simple game we played as kids, taught us the importance of taking a moment to decide on one goal and going after it together as a team. I wonder if the creators of these games came up with these games, to imbibe in kids from a young age, the qualities of good citizens. Or are we as spectators assigning these additional meanings? Reminds me of similar musings we had during Literature class regarding the sentence-by-sentence dissection of poetry and the poet’s intentions behind this lines.

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
- The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe

Get what I meant?