Comparing Sports and Games of Indian and Western Children

Yesterday I started commenting on the list of items that UNICEF listed as necessary for children in rich countries. Without two or more of them, they are considered as poor. I compare it with the situation in India point by point:

6. Regular leisure activities (swimming, playing an instrument, participating in youth organizations etc.)

This is the first point for which I actually think it might be necessary in European countries but not in India. During many years of travelling in the west, in Europe, Australia and USA, I have again and again seen how children stay in their rooms, sit in front of TV and don’t move the whole day long. While this is obviously not only a problem of poverty, I think it would be good to encourage children to get out and do something else from time to time.

In India however children are out all the time. There may not be that many organized offers like sports clubs and swimming pool areas with guided program, but children don’t need it either. They go out, meet their friends, play on the road and use pretty much whatever they find. When we were small we used to meet so many other children at the river, swimming the whole day. Our Ashram boys just need a ball and maybe a cricket bat and they are busy in their game. There are a lot of games that work with far less equipment, too. A stick, a shoe or nothing at all.

Another factor may be that we just have a lot of children in India. I have seen in Germany how difficult it is for children to find the company of others – and if they cannot pay for the participation in a youth club or something similar, they may feel very left out. India’s population is however so big that you will always find people of all ages out on the road, ready for all different kinds of activities.

7. Indoor games (at least one per child, including educational baby toys, building blocks, board games, computer games etc.)

I had to think about my comment to this one a bit. Not because I didn’t know whether that would apply for India or not but because I want to be sure you understand my answer. It is a complicated question, mainly because UNICEF used the word ‘educational’ in its formulation of examples. What kind of toys and games are we really talking about?

Every family that has in any way the possibility to do so, tries to give their children something appropriate to play with, also in India. In poor families that may be a hand-stitched little doll made from the torn pieces of some old clothes that could really not be fixed anymore. The child would have a toy – but is it educational? And then there is the question of the education of the parents. A doll can teach a child a lot but only if the person moving the doll and speaking for it has something to teach!

Additionally the relation of indoors and outdoors is very different in India’s hot climate than in Germany’s unsteady weather for example. While a German child may need building blocks, an Indian child, the son of a labourer for example, can sit on the construction site and use bricks or stones that are not used anymore for the same purpose.

Depending on the definition I thus believe that such toys would be normal for Indian children, too, but even the poorest have them!