(Carom or Carrom men used in an indoor board game.)
By Charles Chuck Blakeslee.
I was born in Michigan. I spent 28 years of my life there, 63 in Ohio and am going on 5 years, next January, in Indiana. About 85 years ago I liked to play checkers with my sister, because I could beat her every time. At our last game I beat her again. She got mad, picked up one end of the board and dumped all of the checkers on the floor.My dad was sitting nearby and all he said was, Bernice, pick up the checkers. I imagine that was the last game of checkers that I ever played with her.Now my goal in life is to beat my sister in the game of Life. If I live past December 6, 2005, I will have won the game of Life. My sister lived almost ninety-five and one half years.
NOTE: We didn’t have any checkers. We used carroms instead. When we got to the king row we just put another carrom on top to make a king.
Carrom Men
Carrom uses a set of nineteen light wooden, or acrylic, discs or coins (known as carrom men) - nine white, nine black and one red (known as the Queen.
While wooden carrom men are conventional, the recent acrylic, or resin alternatives, are lighter and less abrasive, thereby, facilitating a faster game. However, if you’ve always played with wooden ones, it does take some time getting used to the acrylic ones - almost like driving an automatic car after years on a manual!
Carrom or Carom?
The answer to this simple question is the same as that to Colour or Color?, Jewellery or Jewelry, Cheque or Check ? and many more. Thankfully, most dictionaries do acknowledge this fact, and show the two spellings as variants of each other.
Nevertheless, Carrom is certainly the well accepted international spelling for the game, as adopted by the International Carrom Federation as well.
Interestingly enough, the number of results found for the search term carom are almost one and a half times that for the politically correct carrom on the leading search engine Google.
Carrom, Carums, Karom or Karum is most popular on the Indian subcontinent, although, versions of it are played right across Asia encompassing the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Yemen, Central Asia from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan and as far East as China, Malaysia and Indonesia. Strangely, in both Scandinavia, the USA and China, versions utilizing small cues in the same way as for Billiards exist.
According to Billy Stevens of the Carrom Company, the US rules for the cue game are the same as the ordinary game but the striker is hit with the cue instead of the finger.
Variations abound - the Fijians, for instance, call the game Vindi Vindi and propel the striker by placing their finger on the tip of an arrow which then rebounds off their finger. Its origin is unknown although boards bearing similarities have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, and Greek writings mention games which appear to be conform to the basic design.
The board is like a small square snooker table made of wood with pockets in each corner. On the board are nine black disks, nine white disks, one red Queen disk and one larger white Striker. Players flick the Striker from their side of the board in an effort to get their own colour disks into the pockets.
Published in US Legacies Magazine November 2005
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