The Toymaker
(A chapter from the book The IITians by Sandipan Deb, Penguin 2004)
'Meet Arvind Gupta,' Dunu Roy told me as I was taking his leave.
'Who is he!' I asked. 'What does he do!'
'Oh, he's a mad guy,' Roy said. 'He makes toys.'
Toys! An IITian making toys? I thought all toys were made in China! So one late afternoon a few days later, I am ringing the bell at a small government-constructed middle-class apartment in south Delhi. I don't know it yet, but I am about to have the most fascinating three hours of all the hundreds I have spent on this book.
Arvind Gupta makes toys. This tall, bearded, jovial, gentle man makes them out of everything that we throw away as useless: empty tetrapak boxes, film-roll cans, used bicycle tubes, old newspapers, ball-point pen refills that have run out of ink, matchsticks. He does it so that underprivileged children--or privileged ones, for that matter can make their own toys they can have fun with, and simultaneously learn the principles of science - aerodynamics, hydraulics, electromagnetism, acoustics.
'Here, look at this, this is fascinating!' he tells me, and I find myself joining him on the door of his sitting room, on which he has arranged a newspaper littered with all sorts of odds and ends. He is holding in his hand a little contraption, which on closer inspection turns out to be a normal torch battery, which has been attached to two narrow metal strips at both ends. The battery has a small disc shaped magnet tied to it. Above the magnet hangs a copper coil. The two ends of the wire jut diametrically outward and go into two tiny holes drilled in the metal strips. 'What do you think this is!' he asks me. I admit defeat.
'This is the cheapest DC motor on earth!' he says triumphantly, and taps the coil, which immediately starts rotating very fast. The metal strips, in addition to holding the coil, also supply current to the coil. Gupta has scraped off the enamel from three sides of the end leads of the copper wire, so that the enamel remains only at the bottom, touching the metal strip. Enamel being an insulator, no current flows. When he taps the coil, the lead turns, and the metal strip comes into contact with the copper. Instantly, current starts flowing, turning the coil into an electromagnet, which, through the mutual attraction-repulsion with the magnet below it, attached to the battery, starts spinning and continues to do so, till its south and north poles are aligned to the north and south poles of the other--permanent-- magnet. At which point the enamel part of the leads again comes in contact with the metal, and the coil is de-magnetized.
He shows me a hand pump made from an empty plastic film-roll can, a bicycle spoke and a soft drink straw. He shows me an abacus made from the sole of a rubber slipper, three pencils inserted into three holes in the rubber, and up to nine rings on each of the pencils. His enthusiasm is child-like and infectious, and I find myself playing with his toys. Take the rings off the pencils, apply pressure on the rubber sole so it becomes concave, and the three pencils converge as rays of light, explaining how a concave mirror works! Do it the other way round for convex mirror!
'We have this constipated notion of science education, that you can't do it without pipettes and burettes and all those things,' he says, as he hunts for something else to show me. 'Most schools are anti-child. In the laboratories, everything is always locked up, and there's a layer of dust on the tables. I believe that the best thing that a child can do with a toy is break it and try to see how it works. Encourage the child to break his or her toys!'
'Any fool can make a thing complicated, right!' he says. 'It's simplicity which is difficult to achieve.'
'School education in India is such barren terrain that even a good seed would die due to lack of soil,' Gupta tells me. 'My humble task is to find a bit of soil so the seed can be nourished.'
He shows me the flute he has made from a soda straw. As he blows into it, he keeps snipping off the flute from the end with a pair of scissors, and the sound changes. 'So the child gets a qualitative understanding of the phenomenon of vibration,' he explains. 'I work with children. Whatever I see that children can do, whatever I see that brings a gleam into the child's eye, that's the work I do.'
As I leave, my head is filled with all the fun my seven-year-old daughter and I am going to have from now on, all that I am going to teach her and be taught.
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