I saw this collection of erasers at a store recently and memories of the yester-years came flooding to my mind.

When I was in primary school, my friends and I would just call erasers as ‘rubber’. But fast forward to this century, ‘rubber’ has become rather a sensitive word.

It was a craze back then in my primary school days when my classmates and I would just spent our ‘hard-earned’ pocket money to buy such rubbers, with a picture of a country depicted on the top face of each ‘rubber’. The cost of one such eraser was 10 cents per piece and the challenge of all collectors is to collect all the 48 erasers!

Anyway, would it be far easier to just purchase one whole box of such erasers, containing all the 48 erasers than collecting them individually? However, the school stationery shop sold these erasers separately and the possession of one freshly-minted box of erasers is only for the richer kids!

My classmates and I were always scrambling to purchase the erasers of different flags. Some erasers with ‘more beautiful’ flags such as the United States of America and Cuba, to name a few, were always hard to get as they ran out of stock fast. It was a challenge hence to complete a full collection of these erasers.

With our limited collection of these erasers, we would normally indulge in playing ‘rubber-flipping’ games, where using our fingers, two opponents would flip their eraser towards that of the opponent and the winner would be the one where his eraser flipped to lay on top of his opponent’s.

Those were the yester-years! Now erasers are just erasers for the kids, who are more interested in the internet and computer games!