My father told me about a dare which he once carried through (yes, he had an inexhaustible fund of anecdotes!). When he was a very junior officer in the army and stationed in Delhi, his batch mates dared him to drive his jeep into the Officers’ Mess. This entailed taking the jeep up a considerable flight of steps leading to the entrance and then into the dining hall. Not one to say he couldn’t do it, my father took on the dare and carried it through. This was corroborated by another officer who was party to the event, so I know that it really happened!
Dares were silly things: challenges between friends which could be ridiculous, hilarious, and hair-raising but very rarely downright dangerous. They may have entailed breaking the rules but never the law. They ranged from putting frogs in the teacher’s desk (been there, done that!) to hanging unmentionables on the Institute’s flagstaff. None of the dares we undertook had tragic consequences; they only earned mild censure (apart from adding to ‘hoary legend’). What is more, the challenge was undertaken willingly – even with a tinge of excitement - and without coercion. Invariably, the challenger and the challenged were partners in crime as well. Those were the times of naïve, even foolish, audacity and derring-do.
There were no fast cars (thanks to no money), no drugs, no alcohol, no guns. And some dares had happy outcomes too. My father was at one time a chain smoker. Then his batman (not the caped crusader but an attendant attached to an officer posted at camp) dared him to give up. It wasn’t easy (and he couldn’t cheat because the batman was virtually his left arm) but, as already stated, my father couldn’t resist a challenge and he gave up smoking for good. The batman lost but got his bottle of rum anyway. Two winners!
Challenges tested one’s mettle. Challenges could be remembered with a grin and sometimes a grimace (did I really do that?).
Where did things go wrong? When did challenges turn criminal? When was innocence lost?
I once read an article on ‘Why toy guns should be banished’ as it was felt that such toys were responsible for turning men into killing machines (published a generation ago, it did not ‘implicate’ girls). The author argued the point back and forth and concluded that even if toy guns were banned, all the child had to do was point two fingers and say, ‘Bang, bang, you’re dead!’. Boys will be boys.
Perhaps what we thought was innocent fun was not so innocent after all. Perhaps it was the precursor to more inventive and even more dangerous dares. Or was it?
No comments:
Post a Comment