Our kid-tracker GPS device.

Ever since our son started walking, which was when he was 1 year old, one of our worries was about tracking his whereabouts at home. This is more of a concern in our small town in Kerala where people live in independent homes with big yards, unlike the apartment-culture that is prevalent in the cities.

Our apartment in Chennai is just 800 sq.ft. and consists of 2 bedrooms, a drawing room, a kitchen & 2 washrooms. Tracking a kid in this small space is no issue at all. But back home
in Kerala, our home stands on half-an-acre of land and our home itself is sprawled over a
few thousand sq.ft. with 4 bedrooms, a drawing room, a dining room, a kitchen, a TV-room,
a store-room, 2 bathrooms, 2 toilets etc. Tracking a kid in here would be like looking for a
needle in a haystack.

Adding to the problem is the fact that we have a busy road bang in front of the home, plus
a deep well in the backyard (after our son's birth, we had a cover made for the well). And bordering our land are acres of fields that are low-lying and which get filled with water
either during heavy rains or when the river is in spate. All these are potential hazards
when you have a kid at home. And when you know of people in the neighborhood who
have had bad experiences, it makes you all the more worried.

Bang opposite our house, a new home has come up, in which stay a couple and their 'only' daughter who would be in her early twenties. The couple actually had another daughter
named Chitra who was younger to this girl. The father was working in Delhi and during
vacations they would come down to Kerala. On one such vacation many years ago, during
a brief moment of being left unattended, Chitra wandered off into the backyard & started walking on the water canal (which I have mentioned in a previous photo-blog).

Along the way, she saw a 'puddle' of water that had plants bearing beautiful flowers in it.
She decided to reach for the flowers, but fell into the puddle which was actually quite deep
and drowned. Friends, family and neighbours who started searching for the kid, found her
little body floating in the water. My sister drove the panicky parents & Chitra to the nearest hospital in our car, but it was too late for the doctors to do anything. I can't imagine how
much those parents would have pained on losing their little kid.

They own 4 buses that ply to nearby towns and at night are parked in the yard in front of
their home. All the 4 buses are named Chitra, in memory of the kid they lost. My son believes that those buses belong to him - he says "Aman-de Chithira bus", which translates to "Aman's Chitra bus". And at nights, when he is irritable and refuses to sleep, one of the things that my wife knows will calm him, is to bring him to the gate of our house, from where he can see the
4 buses parked there.

Since this incident involving Chitra remains fresh in our mind, inspite of the fact that this happened years ago, we have always been worried as to how to track our son as he starts walking. From the time my first niece Divya was born in 1999, we had made it a practice
to keep the gate latched, so as to avoid her from getting onto the busy road. This practice continued when Ann was born and is now again followed after Aman was born.

Still there remained the danger of his walking out into the backyard or to the water-logged
fields & we racked our brains to come up with a solution for this problem. Finally we decided
that the best solution would be to use a tracker-device - our own GPS, but which does not
rely on any satellites. Heck, it does not even need any batteries. In the pic below, Aman is
seen wearing his own custom-tracker on his ankles.


This ornament is called a 'Kolusu' in Kerala ('Golusu' in Tamilnadu & anklet in English) and is usually made of silver, though in Kerala girls prefer gold. In Tamilnadu they don't use gold for Golusu because gold is respected and it is seen as a bad thing to have it at your feet. Kolusu is usualy worn only by girls / women and so Aman attracts a lot of attention when we go out because people find it amusing that a boy is wearing it. Ofcourse they don't know why we have him wear it.

I bought this Kolusu at Chennai with a friend helping out a lot with the selection (Thanks a lot Maa'm) because as a rule I don't buy jewellery and thus would be lost in a jewellery shop. My only criteria was that it should have lots of bells on it, more the merrier, so that every step he takes will be audible loud and clear. Finally we zeroed in on this particular model & guess what, it really solved the problem. And at 1100 bucks, I could not have asked for more.

There are times when Aman is playing somewhere in the vicinity of our home and I have managed to track him only using the noise of the bells. And, when he is sleeping, we can be in another part of the house getting some work done, but clearly make out if he is restless or awake, by the ringing of the bells. Initially when we tried to put the anklets on, he resisted the attempt, but now he is so used to it that it has become like a part of him. Guess we will keep the anklets on his feet for a few more years.