Maneet Chauhan, executive chef of Vermilion, grew up in Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand (then Behar), in the eastern part of India, “where we didn’t have TV until I was about 8 years old,” she recalled.
So the chef, who today cooks Latino-Indian fusion cuisine, had to make her own fun with the other “hooligans in our locality.” Their game of choice?
“We used to love playing a game called ‘Seven Stones.’
” In this game, the kids would break into two groups and one would “build a little tower made with seven flat stones in stacked descending order.”
The teams would form a circle around the stones and “one team would throw the ball — it was like a tennis ball — at the tower trying to break it. The other team would try to catch the ball and throw it people on the other team to get them out.”
The winner would either knock down the whole tower or get everyone on the other team out.
The biggest payoff, though, was after you’d won and you were “rebuilding the pyramid in the middle and you got to shout ‘pitto’ to the other team, which means ‘we won.’
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Some things about childhood sports are pretty universal.