PTER a brief ines, the Pied Piper ff selence toys Sri Jagir Chand Soni breathed his last on 10 Doe 2001 ipa nursing home in Delhi, Soni was born in Jalandhar in 1921. His father was the Head of the Department of Physies and the Vice Principal of the D A.V College in Jalanethar. The father imbued his tuo sons, the elder Ratan Chand and the younger Jagr Chand ~ ith # tove for science. hy thoze polonlal days just about every piece of laboratory equipment was imported. Ratan and Jagir wore perhaps the frst amongst Tmdian to make their ovn telescope in the early forties {first met Sri J © Sont in 1981 ata work: shop on seienee texching alds organised by the Department of Teaching Aids, NCERT Thad displayed the matchstick mecaamo and scores of other zero-cost science toys land models on table, Even after the work Shop ended an elderly: man continued to peer over those small models with great Interest, He liked the whocis which I had Improvised out of cheap quality show buttons, a Jong needle and small piece of used ball pen ref ‘This was my first meeting with Soni. For the ext gwenty years we met quite frequently ‘That Sonfi pioneered the pro. duction of science toys would be stating the obvious, He design mraniufactured and distributed toys/seience teaching aids ~ call them what you will oust about ‘every nook and earner of this vast subeontinenta? country, Being a staunch nationalist his product range Was appropriately named “Raman” toys. Over the oars he had learnt to deal scith the moribund seaceinsttations the NCERT, SIETS, DIETS and the DST. He was also the lifeline for ‘many genuine grassroots popular solenee groups. For he supplied ‘hem th optical Tenses and fer ite magnets cosine iss Fup ih He used thes institut te fail his one point send tevin to gfitlarse low-cvt boner tay and teaching ai 1 usbue the learning. of dreary school selence with a bit of fur Sonill practised the concrpt of Pied Piper of ARVIND GUPTA pays tribute to J © Soni, the man who pioneered the production of science toys and poputarised them in every nook and corner of the country with a missionary zeal (OR nc ig a AS. science toys copyleft with reat admiration. He took ‘ideas from all ever ~ Indian or foreign adapted chem into low-cost materials, ‘mass produced them to get Sconomies of scale and distribated them with a mission ary zeal. always admired his 2st for life and love for children. Often he would give ‘every child a puzzle ~a tangram, T shape puze, a Soma’s cube and challenge thom to solve it There was a Dit of a prize thrown in. tf the children solved the puzzle they could have, gn and take it home for good, Thus children got hooked to sol ing puzzles! Sonijis toys had no competitors, becatuse he had very low overheads. Son ‘yas the designer, manufactures, salesman all rolled into fe, He primarily did what he did to fulfill a deep cerebral impulse rather than to make a peat ptoht- Often his, commercially successfu) sons sould ask ‘Why do you peddle these five rupees toys, ‘when you hardly make any money on them? But Soni went on. He went from fone thing to the next = a esiscope costing § rupees, the collapsible telescope the mineral ‘set containing shreds of 50 com mon minerals, the microscope the optical kit and hundreds of others. Often his toys lacked fin Ish and were not of the best qual- ity But they were very affordable, fad this is why they spread like wild fire. In every Book Fair Sonili’s shop of science toys was literally: mobbed by children Soni recoived several national awards for his outstanding con ‘wihutlons dr science popularist June 2001 spent three days with Soniji doing a workshop for the activists of the Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad. Ke earnestly wanted to hand over his running enterprise to the sci fence movement. But that was not to bo. With Soni gone a er as como t0 an end. | would always ‘iss him asa dear fiend and an Inspiring science populariser ‘Sutvadhar Features