The Game of Lagori

Childhood days are indeed the best days of one’s life. We associate our childhood usually with games and fairy tales of our grannies. One of the many games that the kids of 90’s indulged themselves into is the game of Lagori. This game is known by various names such as dikori, lagoori, Lingocha, Pithu (Punjabi), Palli Patti (Karimnagar), Pitto (Rajasthan), Pittu (Bengal) or Satoliya (Madhya Pradesh). It is a simple game which requires a ball and a pile of flat stones. In order to play this game, children divide themselves into two teams in a large outdoor area. One team is known as “the hitters” and the other team is that of the “the seekers”.

This game is very fondly played by children especially in the villages where it is hardly possible for children to indulge themselves into expensive games. The game starts with a player of one team (the hitters) who hits a tennis ball at the pile of flat stones and tries to knock them down. The team of “the seekers”, try to restore the pile while the team of hitters tries to hit a ball at them. If the ball hits a seeker, that seeker is out and the team the seeker belongs to continues to play, without the seeker. A seeker can protect himself by touching an opposite team member before the ball hits the seeker. Some of the other additional rules include the following: the boundary should be marked clearly. If any of the seekers crosses it, they are out; if a person is trying to knock down the pile and fails to do it in three tries, they are out; In any of the three tries, if the thrower's ball does not knock down the pile and is caught by an opponent after the first bounce then the thrower is out; each team contains equal number of players; piles of flat stones should contain 7 stones; hitters cannot run with the ball and hit the seekers; once the pile of stones is restored the player should say lagori 3 times and swipe his hands around the stones.

By: Anuja Arora

Content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagori