Un-thak-shah-ree

The sweat on my brow was mid-drip—it was that precarious second when the drop dangles on you eyebrow before sliding off your eyelash and becoming part of the moisture falling off your frame—I was frozen.

“Jaldi bolo, say it fast, we only have three seconds,” Shyla prodded me.

The drop fell off my face and the smile returned as I burst out loudly, off-key, “ILU, ILU, are ILU ILU…I love you, bolo, I love you”

The collective sigh of my team-mates confirmed that I had not lost us the round or repeated a previously sung lyric. Phew! Off the hook till the next round.

In Bombay, during a power cut when the servants are either at the market or otherwise engaged, there is no AC and with the exception of fanning yourself furiously—which would only lead to sweating more profusely—you have no choice but to define time in these terms: pre-drip, mid-drip, and post-drip. In these times when you can’t watch television or go outside, because of the scorching sun, you have no choice but to amuse yourself in old-fashioned ways. The ever popular advice of our mothers and grandmothers remain, “Study something! Learn something! Read something!” But we buck that tradition to play indoor games. We aren’t a country known for board games but we do have a veritable pu-pu platter of knowledge-based games.

This particular game is Anthakshree (pronounced un-thak-shah-ree): a popular method of timepass amongst Indian children which promotes Bollywood films by encouraging the player to view the most number of films in an effort to amass the most information about current and past song lyrics. The way the game works is that you break up into teams of two or more and draw straws to see which team starts the game.

The starting team has the advantage of choosing any song from a Bollywood film and singing the chorus or most popular, discernable part of the song aloud for everyone to hear. They can stop singing whenever they choose—mid-sentence, but not mid-word. The next team has 10-15 seconds to come up with a different popular song that starts with the exact sound the last team ended their song with and so on and so forth. If you choose a part of a song that is not easily identified by someone on one of the opposing teams you have to name the song, the movie it is from, and the year the movie was released. If you cannot sing a lyric in time or sing a song that has already been sung, your team is out.

As you can imagine, as the game progresses it becomes exceedingly difficult to think of a song that hasn’t been sung because once any part of a song has been used it is off-limits to be replayed in that particular game. There is absolutely no physical labor or movement required to play the game. Whether you have Polio or you're an Olympic athlete you have the same opportunities for success available to you. More often than not, you’re munching on a papaya, spitting out the seeds, or holding a wet watermelon slice to your sticky mouth as you struggle to think ahead and search you memory for where the current song may trail off and which song from your mental jukebox you should pick to deliver next.

After all, you can make your opponent’s life a lot harder by ending on sounds that are less likely to allow for the start of other songs. The game can be played rather offensively in that regard. Similarly, you can play defensively, by knowing a great many songs and ensuring that you pick team-mates you are strong in genres you are weak. Thankfully, Bollywood releases a minimum of 450 movies per year and on average each movie has 5-6 song sequences, so your choices for songs are seemingly limitless.

Being one of the more studious members of any given group I have played with, I remain the weakest link. This also makes me a wild card because you never know when I could dazzle by belting out a popular ditty in the nick of time. The game taught me all about teamwork, reading people, timing, and bluffing. After all, I could make up a song, movie title, year, etc. and be left unquestioned if I delivered these responses with an adequate level of confidence given the sheer volume of titles to choose from. Given my predisposition to sing softly to eliminate opportunities for mockery of my tone-deafness, I was exposed to much questioning on the validity of my song choices.

To this day, I blame my mainstream tastes and fascination with popular music on the consistent playing of Anthakshree as a child. The game is geared toward knowing the most amount of useless information. The only skill it hones is route memorization and its main purpose is to quell creativity by promoting conformity all the while shamelessly marketing Bollywood film and music. It also showcases with transparency your ability to carry a tune—to this day, I will not get up and karaoke, no matter how many drinks are in me.