Chungki

Chungki

Imagine young boys and girls kicking a bunch of rubber bands tied together and this is what you will get; the popular and cheap game of “Chungki”. According to popular belief and from what little research I have done, it was found that this game was invented/popularized by the taxi drivers of Kalimpong and Darjeeling to keep themselves warm in the chilly weather when they were waiting for passengers. It found its way into Bhutan through the Bhutanese students studying in those towns.

All it takes is a few ngultrums worth of rubber bands which have to be tied together by another rubbber after stringing it through the other rubber bands. It is then scrunched up and ready for play. Perfect round rubber bands were difficult to find and even if you did, it cost more than the other rubber bands. If you wanted your chungki to be funky, you could go for the colorful ones instead of the standard black color.

The basic rules were very simple. Keep juggling the chungki in the air with your legs (a difficult version of the game did not allow the juggling foot to touch the ground, otherwise it was standard to let the juggling foot touch the ground after every juggle of the chungki). If the chungki touched the ground, then your turn was over and the turn would pass on. The player with the highest juggle count won the game.

We used to have team games with 2 or more players forming teams and compete with others. A line would be drawn to divide the playing space between the teams. The usual rule was that any team could touch the chungki not more than the number of players on the team (3 players=3 touches) with an individual player not juggling the chungki more than twice and the chungki would have to cross the middle line into the other teams space with the 3rd touch. Since there would be no net involved, usually the chungki would cross over the line at knee length or above. The objective was to make the chungki difficult to juggle for the opposition and points would be scored against every failed attempt.

We would have a huge number of players waiting to play their turns so the games had to be fast and furious. In extreme and heated games, players would try to block the chungki from entering their space by deliberately blocking/kicking the chungki by crossing the line. This would amount to lots of injured legs due to the leather Bata shoes and also exchange of words.

We would draw up fixtures to conduct chungki tournaments with entry fees and prizes. There would always be problems with the matches and that is what made playing chungki fun. The rules were never set in stone so there could be lots of improvisations with the rules, sometimes leading to arguments and fights (happened to us a lot) with each team/player maintaining that their version of the rules were right.

Playing chungki got rid of our boredom during school hours and every nook and corner would have a lively chungki session going on. Our shoes wore out faster and the morning polish disappeared by the second period, but chungki helped a lot with your footwork if you were into playing football or basketball.

It was cheap, widely available, everyone played it, made you sweat and best of all, it was fun.

This is a part of a series of blogs I will be writing on some of the things/moments that my generation has grown up with during our childhood in the 90's and early 00's. 

Most of the information/research for these blogs all come from memory or hearsay so I am not responsible if you quote me.