Roll of the dice

Kanaka Ananth creates board games that she believes “keeps social interaction alive”. Neha Bhatt plays along.

K anaka Ananth picks one of the board games she has designed, places it on the table, and rolls a dice. We follow Lord Rama into the forest and back to the palace over about 20 minutes of play. “Longer than that, and you run the risk of a child losing interest in the activity,” she says.

So much for the Ramayana. Ananth has also created another board game using stories from the other great epic, the Mahabharata. It is her love for fantasy, explains the 31-year-old, that fuelled her interest in toy designing.

“Toy designing is something I have been passionate about since my days at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad,” she says. “I am an architecture graduate, so that helps me look creatively at children’s spaces, which, too, I sometimes design. But I felt there was a great need to open up parents’ minds towards [play options for] their children, and encourage them to think creatively. I feel that in north India, parents are relatively more open on subjects such as design, art and craft [compared to parents] in the south.” Ananth, who was born in Mumbai, has shifted base from Bangalore, where her parents live, to Coimbatore, where she now teaches at the DJ Academy of Design.

Board games, which can serve as an important learning aid for children, have not been as popular in India as they are abroad, says Ananth. “I spent a few years of my childhood in Germany, where board games were popular gifts given to us by every visitor coming home. There were also board game forums, and play days where families would come together to play, and bring in new games. Today, parents readily give children video games, and in the process, social interaction is lost.”

Toy design, says Ananth, resembles product design in many ways, with the difference that in toys there is a specific focus on ‘character development’. “For example,” she explains, “you could work around the character of an elephant, and develop mechanical principles in the [resulting] toy to help children develop their motor skills.”

Ananth turned toward mythology because she saw a gap in the market. “There are many board games in the market related to the Qur’an and the Bible, but not to Indian mythology. So I developed these games for the company Creative (which manufactures educational aids). I designed a few board games based on the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, tourism in India, and even wildlife adventure,” she says.

These games are especially popular with NRIs, she adds, because they feel the need to educate their children in the “epics and moral values”. Along with a friend, Ananth also conducts workshops for children on how to make storybooks, puppets, enact stories and design games, in Chennai, Bangalore and Coimbatore.

She has taken the initiative in another neglected sector — games in regional languages. She believes that providing learning aids in local languages will help reach out to more people. “I made some prototypes that I gifted to friends’ children,” she says. “They value them because it’s nice to receive something that’s not available in the shops!”