About: From the time we are born, through childhood, adolescence, adulthood and probably into old age as well, we acquire and carry a chestful of fetishes, likes, dislikes, crazy beliefs, and what not? Let us call the best of them as Favourite Things. These are a few of my favourite things, and I’m sure you will be able to relate to them, with nostalgia. Also a run, down memory lane from the 1960s, in Tamil Nadu, India.
The title itself is one of my favourites-a song from the unforgettable classic Hollywood movie, The Sound of Music, released in the year 1965, which starts with, when I am sad I remember a few of my favourite things: “Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm wooden mittens, brown paper packages tied up with strings, these a few of my favourite things…”
Recall, the Sound of Music won five Oscars from ten nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Scoring Music, and Best Sound (proved that the sound is indeed good). The movie forever trapped the Von Trapp Family and Austria’s Vienna in my memory: an enthralling musical by Hollywood’s Rodgers & Hammerstein. And of course, the tongue-keeping songs such as, Do-Re-Mi, doe a deer; I am sixteen going on seventeen; so long farewell; Edelweiss… Well, I’m not actually sad at the moment, but being in a cheerful mood, I can pack my favourite things for any gloomy times ahead.
When studying in Boarding School in the Hill Station of Yercaud, I used to come home only twice a year: a fifteen-day, Half-Yearly Holiday in the middle of the year, and a three-month Annual Holiday-beginning in November and ending in January of the following year.
I lived on a farm in the wonder years and bringing the early learnings of the Hill Station School to the farm, and mixing it up, was often incredibly crazy. For e.g., I thought the water springing in a well was because of salt (in Tamil, Thaneer ooruthu) and I dug a small hole – my own tiny well- in a field. And when Mom was not looking, stole some table salt and put it in the well along with water hoping the water will spring and overflow! I then cut down a few papaya tree branches-they have a hole running through the length-to serve as pipelines, to take out the spring water (to the fields for irrigation). I waited for days, but the water never got itself out of the well and into the papaya pipelines: it dried out leaving only the salt (for Mom to gather). And I moved on. Lesson learnt.
Those days, in the villages, the most popular means of ‘cleaning your teeth’ was with Gopal Tooth Powder (Gopal Palpodi). It was a pinkish red powder with herbal ingredients (KFC’s Colonel must have drawn inspiration or stolen parts of the formula while brushing his teeth in India?) and came in cool mini-sachets. And you took some of it in your left palm and used the right second finger to rub the cleansing powder over your teeth. I always had a sachet of Gopal Palpodi whenever I travelled, visiting Aunties and Uncles, Grandmas and Grandfathers, during the holidays. Then came the white Colgate tooth power, before toothpaste and tooth brushes bristled into action, stealing the breath and whitening the teeth of India.
In Boarding School it was always the Toothpaste and Tooth Brush combo- strictly no finger-licking tooth powder. My favourite toothpaste, without hesitation, was Binaca, which came with cute miniature collectibles of soft plastic toys in each pack. A plethora of rhinos, panthers, hippos, monkeys, cats, parrots, giraffes, foxes, frogs, penguins, fish, deer, bisons, camels, tortoises, donkeys, ducks, sea-horses, pelicans and cranes, lizards, snails, bears, chimpanzees, gorillas, elephants, creatures great and small… of all colours and shapes, they all came to me in, of all things, the toothpaste box. Oh, how I waited for the next Binaca. Of course, I did eat toothpaste to bring the animals sooner. Then there was this silent, serious-looking bitter tasting fluoride based Forhans Toothpaste, which never gave foam but was said to be a product created by Dentists and for safeguarding gums and enamel. It came in an orange pack and was fierce looking. An Aunt actually forced me to use it. I remember an advertisement when a kid asks the mother, ‘Ethil nurai varumma’ (Will this foam?)
My favourite soap was the pleasant green, Hamam, backed-up by Mysore Sandal Soap for special occasions. The transparent Pears was for the babies seeing-through, before Johnson’s Baby products toddled-in. I despised the other brands such as Margo and the ayurvedic Medimix (later it became a standard feature of almost every Hotel and Lodge).The beauty ‘girlish’ soaps at that time were Lux International and also the ’come alive with freshness soap’, Liril, featuring the bathing beauty Karen Lunel -wearing a green two-piece bikini – under a waterfall, and I did dream about her a lot!
Sunlight was the washing soap that Mom used for the dirty clothes and the pale yellow-bar could always be seen at home. I could not imagine a world without Sunlight before surfing for Surf and then Nirma Washing Powder dancing into our homes. So so did the blue Rin and Det soap, about that time.
Face power was typically Ponds, and later Nycil, with the girls going for that vintage Remy and Cuticura – dusting on the face using a puff held in a nice little powder box.
I never wore a wrist-watch until University and in those days HMT watches- Time keepers to the Nation-was the rage. Of course, I forced my uncle to part with his 24-jewelled, Made-In-Japan Ricoh Automatic Watch for a period. It had a fancy glass-cut as if it was a diamond. This diamond was not forever and I had to return it to my Uncle, after a while. My first owned watch was a Titan, which the Tata’s launched to bring ‘electronic clock’ times to India. And I still have the favourite first watch: a white checked dial base with date, day, month watch at the 3rd hour.
Going back to Films, beyond The Sound of Music, my favourite movie, that I watched and watched over and over again, was the eleven Oscars winning epic Ben-Hur. That galley-slave battle sequence, the Chariot Race, and the story of Jesus Christ without showing us his face, struck a chord and raced in the mind.
Another ‘watched again-and-again’ favourite is Bruce Lee’s, ‘Enter the Dragon’. The superb, clever Kung-Fu fight sequences are a delight to watch. And it was devastating to learn that Bruce Lee unfortunately died at age 32, six days before the movie’s premiere in Hong Kong. He never witnessed the massive ground-breaking international success of Enter The Dragon, which was his first. I would call it a cult movie of the time and thereafter Bruce Lee became a global icon.
Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, Gregory Peck, John Wayne, and Charlton Heston were my favourite heroes and almost all Hollywood heroines stepped into a long list. Spoilt for choice. Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Grace Kelly, Sophia Lauren, Raquel Welch, Ursula Andress – she was constantly in a state in undressing – and was the Bond girl, rising up from the sea, in the first ever James Bond movie, Dr No.
In our own Indian Film World, MGR, Sivaji Ganesan, Jaishankar, Kamal Hassan, Rajinikanth, Savithri, Saroja Devi, Sri Devi and Zeenath Amman were a few of my favourites. And music by M S Viswanathan, and later Ilayaraja, with songs sung by T M Soundararajan, S P Balasubramanian, P B Sreenivas, P Susheela, S Janaki, always hummed inside.
Over time, I became a voracious reader and comics paved the way to serious reading. Tarzan-of the Apes, Phantom-the Ghost Who Walks (Oh, I loved Diana Palmer, the Horse-Hero, and the Wolf Dog-Devil, and the Phantom rings), Richie-Rich, Wendy the Witch, Little Lotta, and later Asterix ruled this part of the world. Mandrake the magician and a local Tamil comic series, ‘Irumbukkai Maayavai’ (the man with the iron hand) was another electrifying story, which was based on Steel Claw-one of the most famous British Weekly Adventure Comics. Then there was the comic strip Axa, which featured a semi-nude, busty, sexy, sword-wielding long-haired blonde heroine. Stirred-up many a thing.
Top-gear novels were Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, The Secret Seven, and Captain W E Johns’ Biggles (James Bigglesworth) detective series. Then I delved into the Westerns such as Oliver Strange-the Marshall of Lawless -the James Green series being a favourite. Harold Robbins’s ‘Never Love A Stranger’ and novels by James Hadley Chase opened new worlds filled with smooth mountain peaks and bushy valleys. Debonair and Playboy -I never dared buy them, but borrowed – they were magazines I read-nay, looked- beneath bed-sheets or in the dark alleys of Boarding School life. In later years Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot – Murder on the Orient Express -were my favourite detectives solving crime after crime. Often I would sit down in a corner of a restaurant and ‘play’ Sherlock Holmes in the mind.
Shoes and slippers were invariably Bata, then BSC (Bata Shoe Company), and with another brand called Corona a distant competition. One of my favourites was a brown-colour, foot-covering sandal, which I used until it broke-fractured into two- and helplessly stitched together to hold for many more times, at least while walking on the farm, at home.
Studying in an Anglo-Indian English Medium School from the beginning I was naturally drawn to Western music, The Bee Gees- every song; Beatles – yellow submarine and other songs; ABBA-Dancing Queen, Fernando; Osibisa, dance the body music; Boney M, The Rivers of Babylon; and Eruption’s, ‘One Way Ticket to the Moon’; The Eagles, Hotel California; Survivor, the Eye of the Tiger; Johnny Wakelin – The Black Superman, about Muhammad Ali flying like a butterfly and stinging like a bee. Later on, Air Supply, Foreigner, Dire Straits, Police, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd-the Wall – became favourites.
In the early days – due to my ‘English’ upbringing – I struggled with the Tamil language and an Aunt of mine introduced me to two magazines, which made my Tamil almost poetic and even classic. One was ‘Kumudham’ and the second was ‘Kalkandu’. Tamilvanan was the founding editor of the then widely read Kalkandu (Sugar Crystals), which published fiction, articles about state politics, and Tamil cinema, and pages of factoids. Tamilvanan’s novels featured the detective hero Shankarlal, who travels the world solving crimes and battling criminals, much like a James Bond. The novels often contain a good deal of factual information about the settings, which educated the Tamil audience about countries to which, at the time, relatively few Indians could afford to travel. Shankarlal frequently travelled with his wife Indra and his servants, Kathrikai (the nickname means ‘eggplant’ a reference to his fat belly and tuft of hair) and Manickam. Shankarlal always wore a black hat and sunglasses and was famous for drinking great quantities of tea. Tamilvanan’s motto as a journalist was ‘courage is the best companion’ (in Tamil ‘Thunivee Thunai’). In Kalkandu, he often substantiated his facts and statistics with authorities such as Encyclopaedia Britannica and Guinness Book of World Records besides other scholarly works.
Then there was Thiruvalluvar’s 1330 verse Thirukkural, which was a must read and must study. The Public Transport Buses in Tamil Nadu had a verse, or more, painted on the inside- to educate yourself, on the move.
On the English side, I loved the cheekyThe Illustrated Weekly of India – a weekly, odd-sized magazine newspaper and The Indian Express newspaper. I hated the stubborn and serious looking, The Hindu newspaper, and it was best used for lining shelves. An Aunt (oh, the same one!) of mine even used it to line the trays when she bought her first ever refrigerator. Those days the popular brands were, Kelvinator, Godrej, and Voltas.
In the school days chewing gum was popular as was Fruitex confectioneries. In the 1960s and 70s Fruitex were known for having collectible stamps inside its wrappers. Sweets with stamps for stamp collection, and I became a Stamp Collector.
I was always fascinated by Mermaids: those mythical, beautiful long-haired, curvy, well-endowed beauties, with the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a fish. And two years ago, when I went to Poland’s Warsaw I learnt about ‘The Mermaid of Warsaw’, which armed with a sword and shield is believed to protect the City. I bought a momento of the Warsaw Mermaid, which I keep close to my heart (might prevent a Heart Attack). Legend says that the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen is the Warsaw mermaid’s sister and they went separate ways from the Baltic Sea.
My favourite off-school games were, Marbles, Tops-Pambaram, Killi-Thandu/Gilli Danda, Snakes & Ladders (Paramapadham), Aadu Puli Aatam. Dhaayam – Daayakattai similar to the ancient Chaupur, as played in the Mahabharata, or modern-day Ludo. Chinese checkers and Chess did climb up the ladder as I progressed in School.
In Golli Gundu -as it was called in Tamil -we used glass marbles to hit and capture other players’s marbles placed in a circular area. As in a form of ‘rudimentary golf’ we shoot marbles into a small dug-out hole. I’m unable to recall the exact rules of the game, but I do remember pivoting my left fingers on the ground, holding a marble in the middle or index finger with the right hand and releasing it with precise aim, much like a catapult. Also a kind of ‘ground billiards’. And I could aim and hit another marble at quite a distance.
Pambaram (Top – made of wood) where we spin it as long as possible with a deft sting pull and a clever nail on which the Top spins. Sometimes we attack another top placed in a circle on the ground, by hitting it in a top strike. And I was an expert in making the top spin on my palm (with a flat nail). Perhaps this became the basis for the Hero spinning a Pambaram on the Heroine’s bare belly, in a popular Tamil movie. That was tingling, for sure!
In Gilli-Danda, a two-team game, a short stick with tapering ends is lobbed into the air by the longer stick the Danda, and hit as far as possible. The distance from the ‘hit point’ to the spot where Gili lands is measured in Dandas. If the Gilli is caught by the opposite team, while in the air, he is considered out (sometimes the whole team) or if he fails to strike the Gili on three consecutive attempts he is declared out. Some kind of ancient baseball?
During my school days electricity had yet to arrive at home, and we used simple wick-Kerosene lamps or the pressurised Kerosene Petromax Lamps. The latter was a special feature for lighting up Weddings. I particularly enjoyed fitting the incandescent filament, lighting it with a match-stick and then hand-pumping the lamp (pressurising) until the filament glowed a brilliant white light.
As electricity creeped into our Homes, other favourites occupied my mind: the ‘slowly heating-up’ valve-radios, the mobile battery operated Transistor Radios, the Vinyl record-players, he Philips and Bush brands were a huge hit until the National Panasonic cassette players took our world by storm. You can delve into them at
https://kumargovindan.com/2025/05/03/radio-blaa-blaa/
I started writing this article with few things in mind and as it opened and flowed, the few began growing – overwhelmed – and I thought maybe ‘many’ would be a better word but certainly not ‘less’. Should I plan a sequel as ‘much more’ Favourite Things stack-up?
Kumar Govindan's Words 