“Hey, Shivang! Have you seen yesterday’s episode of Beyblade? It was really good” - Ashish asked me just when we were parking our bicycles at the school’s bicycle stand.

“No. My TV cable has some problem, sometimes I get cartoon network, sometimes I don’t " - I sighed disappointingly.

Lately, there has been growing talks of Beyblades all around me. Every one of my friends is excited by the concept and a few of them even had beyblades of their own. Sometimes they do beyblade battles, though I have never been in one I have saw a couple of them. My friend Sanchit who has just bought a nice, shiny, and very speedy mental beyblade had taken me along to a few battles.

Beyblades have always fascinated me. The mechanism, simple physics, and eye catching - Beyblades had them all.

I never had one. I really wanted one but my Mom thinks it’s very costly. Lately, I hadn’t got any new toys at all, I was just playing with my old stuff only. In my home, children aren’t given any pocket money so we are totally on our parent’s mercy. I have asked Mom multiple times but she won’t buy me one so I stuck a deal with her - If I’m able to earn some money, maybe save enough to buy one, then she would allow me to get one. That’s all I needed.

For the last couple of years, I was heavily involved in building school projects. At my school, there was a requirement to do a project in the mid-term of year, some of the grades depend on it. It could be group projects too. In a few subjects, it was harder to do a model project so just a long essay with graphics would do just fine - like Hindi or English. But in Science & Maths - there were limitless possibilities and money.

I was really good at building projects and advertising it. Lots of guys in my class were not very interested in building one themselves so I built them one and in turn charged 10 - 15 Rs. to cover up the cost of supplies. In very lucky cases, I might get some margin but it wasn’t much. My school used to organize a nice exhibition where they would display all the projects done by the students.

After striking out a deal with my Mom, I was determined to make money & fortunately mid-terms were around the corner. I started working on a list of projects I could build. The only way to generate money was to build more projects and charge for each spot a bit more. Every year, I used to do two or three projects but I decided to do at least five this year.

I decided to do a couple of projects in Maths and Science, and one in Polities. One project in Science was particularly hard - it involved creating a bridge from thermocol and then running a train model on the bottom side of it. It involved a bit of rotational & gear stuff - in the end I couldn’t get it right so I had to leave it. Others were easy but took some time. The projects were done well before the deadline and I was able to get fill five spots of each project even though I charged Rs. 20. which was Rs. 5 higher than my usual rate.

Due to my efforts, I was able to save 80 Rs which was about right amount to get a big beyblade. On the night of the exhibition, I went and bought a nice concrete blue color beyblade for 77 Rs. Gave Rs 3 back to my mom. It was sure hard-earned money and it was worth spending. Today, after 10 years I earn about 300 Rs per hour but no amount of money can replace 80 Rs which I first earned and the joy of spending it on the thing I loved.