If you’re kids are tired of the toys you bought them, there’s no need to head for the store again, just rent another one, says Arati Rao.
How early in life do certain humans begin to act like goldfish – saddled with a nanosecond attention span? According to Samruddhi Nayak, the mother of a two-month old daughter, her kid’s already showing signs of it. “After a couple of minutes, she doesn’t want the same toy anymore,” said the 30-year-old, about her daughter. As chance would have it, Nayak has the next distraction close at hand; she started Pintoo Toy Library last year, to keep herself occupied in a new city. “There are hundreds of toy libraries in Mumbai [where she’s from], and we hadn’t heard of too many here. We liked the idea of promoting re-use [of toys], so, I thought, ‘let’s start one and see how it goes,’” she explained.
She started the library in a small space at the top floor of her house in Domlur, with a few toys she picked up in Germany during a short stay there with her husband, while others like alphabet and shape puzzles were brought in from Mumbai. “When I first opened the library, everyone thought we were having a sale of some sort,” she recalled. “It was quite difficult convincing them not to buy things and to plant the concept of renting toys.” She said she was able to persuade five parents to become members by the time she shut shop in February because of her pregnancy [she’s sending text messages out again since she re-opened the space in mid-November].
Almost across the road is another library, Kids Kouch, which has managed to rope in close to 70 members for their toy section, since it opened in July. Available for kids up to the age of five, the shelves here hold a few battery-operated pieces and toys for kids in Montessori, among others. “So many of the products that are made in India, like wooden toys which are useful for early education, aren’t sold to retail stores, so parents don’t have any way to access them,” said Deepali Patel, who runs the library with her husband. She also felt that a library of any sort helps to “inculcate the spirit of sharing in children”. To see how that worked out, we asked one of the members, five-year-old Vinathi Sirlam, how she felt about sharing. “I enjoy the colour puzzles,” she sad. “I feel sad when I have to give some toys back, but I like getting new toys for them ds[in exchange].”
While the Patels enjoy the patronage of parents who come in from as far away as Banaswadi, another couple is making things even more cost-effective for members, by doing away with the trouble of commuting. Rentoys.in was founded by Neeta Verma and her husband Manoj Kumar, who works with the analytics division of a financial services company. The couple started on a small scale in September this year by spreading the word within HSR Layout where they stay. After receiving good feedback from parents, they threw open their collection of branded toys from Fischer Price, Leapfrog, Funskool and so on to the rest of the city by taking the business online and tying up with a courier company for delivery and pick-up [the couple still plan to make the first drop themselves so they can meet the new member]. “So many people stay in flats these days, there’s just no space for so many toys at home,” said Kumar. “Plus, after the kids outgrow whatever they’re playing with, the toys are just dumped in backyards, which become almost like landfills.”
There is certainly no need to do this, though. All parents have to do is send a text message to donate old toys to Toybank, an NGO that passes them on to underprivileged kids. Vinay DR, the Bangalore representative of the organisation, said, “The first thing we do after one of our collection drives is to segregate the toys according to age group and check their condition. Then we gift-wrap them and plan a distribution drive in a remote area, where even a game of snakes-and-ladders is a big thing for a kid, because he or she has never seen anything like it before.”
The group with its 80 volunteers in this city [they also have operations in Mumbai and Pune] has conducted 11 such drives over the past two years. “It is all about re-using versus throwing something away. Also, the joy on a child’s face when he or she gets a toy is indescribable,” said Vinay.
Register
