Games growing up

When I was a kid, we lived in a colony. There were 5 of us who were almost the same age and played with each other every single day from 5:00pm to 6:30pm. It was a fixed routine ... be it weekday or weekend. We came back from school, had snacked and reported our days activities to our respective parents and got together to have a fun evening sharply at 5'o clock. We had this strange way to addressing each other ... we spelt our each other's name ... for example, my friends called me "P-R-I-D-E-R-A" and never Pridera. Our parents hated it and tried to correct us ... but we continued to follow our chosen way.
We played various games like:
* Jhute ... pretty simple game "Catch me" as it is called in most places
* Crocodile crocodile can we cross the golden river - here one person stood in the middle of road and declared a color ... if one had that color in our outfit, one could easily cross the road ... else they had to dodge the one in the middle and cross.
* Hide and seek ... which we called eyes pies
* Queen's palace: where we imagined the huge rocks near the compound to be castles
* Tree climbing: We did this most of the times ... there were 2 chosen trees on which we had gotten comfortable maneuvering from one branch to another
* MIrror Mirror on the wall
* Char pattar
* Bachcha - where we drew patterns of squares we had to hop on
* Hop and catch

We played many other pretend games (pretend like teacher, like a sportsperson, like mommy etc)

I distinctly remember, on wednesdays uncle N (father of one of my friends) used to play music on his stereo system and we all danced .... we hated it initially ... but slowly began to have fun with it.
Once we moved to Mysore ... I played less frequently because of lack of time, friends and slowly my interests shifted to classical music and dance. They took up most part of the evenings.

Now I am in the US and kids play either their homes or in designated areas .... very different from the way I used to play outside my house while growing up.