CHENNAI: It all started when UK-based, Mahadevan Ramanan and his wife Dr Kanjhana decided that they wanted to remodel their son’s building blocks to help him learn, while at play. Mahadevan says, “Theeran was only three at the time, and we would always catch him setting up his blocks carefully, one on top of the other and then pushing them all down again. So we thought, why not put something on the blocks?” And therein, started their personal set of homemade letter cubes to aid their little one in learning a second language, minus the textbook and classroom.Since Theeran was already picking up English with ease, considering everyone spoke it around him, Mahadevan opted to put letters of the Tamil alphabet on the blocks. Kanjhana explains, “I am basically a Sri Lankan Tamil, but grew up in France and now live in England. So it has always been important to me that my children are multi-linguistic.” Mahadevan adds, “We would initially play with him and point out the letters, then we tried forming the blocks in line, like a long train, so he would get some understanding of a sequence.” It wasn’t long before the neighbours and friends of the couple, started requesting blocks for their children, to ease into their cultural roots, and shortly after came the suggestion to forward their venture into a full fledged business.But, before they could start manufacturing, it was time to sit down and play. Mahadevan explains, “You know, putting yourself in the mind of a child, if you find a board filled with detachable picture blocks, like an apple or a star, for example — you’d want to find something on the other side. Most of the puzzles that I’ve seen don’t seem to cater to these little discoveries for kids.” He demonstrates by pulling out a star from the ‘Kidi Puzzzles’ on display, right underneath is the word star in English and flipping it over (the star), one finds the word in Tamil. Another thing that is important to note, he adds is, “Children might not be able to read the words on a block at a very young age, but they can pattern match.”This is perhaps the reason, most of their blocks, have a single letter on one side (either English or Tamil) with easy to use words that have the same starting letter on the other faces of the block. For instance, ‘A’, could have words like apple, axe, aunty and so on.With only a year under their belt, Kalai Kili educational toys has already spread its wings in two continents (UK and Europe), and is set to be introduced into a third, with India on the map as their next market. At the Chennai launch recently, marketing-in-charge, Santhosh stated, “The toys will be available in all leading book stores and the like in Chennai. With regard to introducing them in schools, that should take place within a fortnight.”(Kalai Kili educational toys are eco-friendly and priced between Rs 200 and Rs 800)
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