Friday, April 13, 2012

What I find impressive about Caine's Arcade


Caine's Arcade from Nirvan Mullick on Vimeo.

My husband turned me onto this amazing video--well worth the 11 minutes to watch!

And while the main theme is how creative this boy is, and how the power of the internet can change a life, there are other lessons I noticed that may be less obvious:
  • I am impressed with the man who made the video for taking the time to notice and talk to Caine.  Unfortunately, I am like most of the other adults who walked right by him, not even bothering to reply to his attempts to engage them in his arcade.  Nirvan really is someone who lives in the moment, and was able to pause from the rush of life long enough to see and appreciate this wonder right in front of him.
  • I am impressed not only with Caine's ingenuity, but also his patience and steadfastness.  I cannot even imagine dragging my kids to work in a shop every day all summer long, without thousands of dollars in video gaming equipment, and intolerable amounts of whining, "I'm bored....!"   Now, maybe he did  whine or complain sometimes, but I didn't get that vibe from what I saw of him.  And even if he likes going to the arcade too, what he created was a result of hours and hours of NOT playing video games. *That* really impressed me.
  • I am impressed by Caine's father's encouragement and tolerance.  Not every shop owner would allow their child's project to take over the front entrance of their livelihood.  And there is no way Caine was able to buy all those calculators with the one $2 Fun Pass he sold to Nirvan.
Of course, the punchline to all this is I told my boys they were banned from video games after seeing what a boy with time and imagination can do.  Teddy shot back, "Hey, his parents had tons of boxes for him to work with!"  I reminded Teddy of the 4-5 cardboard boxes dissolving in our backyard in the rain.  We saved them from our dishwasher and other large purchases in the last year.  He shrugged, "Oh, yeah, forgot about those...." and returned to his computer games.  SIGH.

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