Part 12 of 17 in Rethinking Childhood: An Indian Parent’s Guide
Last week, I found myself strolling through a park in Pune, and I was struck by a scene that seemed both familiar and almost foreign in its rarity. A group of children were playing gilli-danda, a game that, for many of us, evokes memories of simpler times when learning happened under the sun, not under the fluorescent lights of a tuition center. The children were laughing, negotiating rules, and occasionally arguing, but every bit of it was education in motion.
I’ve been pondering the profound disconnect between the lessons taught in traditional Indian classrooms and the organic learning that happens when children play. Before there were boards and brands, Indian children learned in the dust. Gilli-danda taught leverage and timing. Kancha taught angles and restraint. Lagori and seven stones taught teamwork under pressure. These were not mere activities; they were the curriculum of a civilization that understood, long before educational research caught up, that the body learns and the mind follows.
Urban India, unfortunately, has almost deleted this classroom. We replaced it with indoor tuition and a screen. Then we hired experts to tell us our children have no focus, no stamina, and no social skill. But what we’ve truly lost is the ability to let children take charge of their own learning through play.
A patient I saw recently confided about her son’s struggles with attention and social interaction. She was considering yet another specialized class to ‘fix’ this. But as we spoke, it became clear that the child had little opportunity for unstructured play. The irony is stark: we design systems that stifle natural learning and then lament the lack of skills that such systems fail to nurture.
Play does something that a lesson cannot. It puts the child in charge of the problem. The goal is visible, and the feedback is instant — you missed the gilli, the marble rolled out, your team got caught. The challenge sits in the Goldilocks zone: hard enough to matter, possible enough to try again. Our grandparents did not need the vocabulary of ‘flow’ or ‘game dynamics.’ They had the gali.
Take Premchand’s story “Gilli-danda,” for example, where a grown man meets the simplicity of the old game and the complications of new values. This isn’t just a literary lesson; it’s a reminder of what we’ve sidelined in our quest for modernity. A stick and a smaller stick, a patch of ground, and rules that children themselves can police — this is a complete school for attention. A child who has never organized a game with neighbors will struggle to organize a project with colleagues. The missing skill isn’t leadership training; it is play that was never allowed to run long enough to need leadership.
I witnessed a simple yet profound transformation in a Pune housing society. Three mothers decided to close the tuition slot on Thursday evenings and opened the terrace instead. The first week was chaos. The second week, the children wrote rules on cardboard. The third week, an older child was teaching a younger one how to stack the stones so they would not fall at a touch. Nobody called this physics or civics. It was both.
One father complained that Thursday was “wasted.” His son, who had been sullen about cricket because he was “bad at sport,” became the official stacker and, later, a willing fielder. Competence had found a side door. This spontaneous classroom on the terrace had done what structured lessons failed to achieve.
So how can we reintegrate play into our children’s lives? First, keep a box with marbles, five stones, a skipping rope, chalk, and two sticks you’ve smoothed so nobody is injured. Learn one traditional game well enough to start it. You don’t have to be good; you have to begin. Prefer mixed ages. Younger children stretch; older children teach. Both are learning.
When rain ruins the compound, play indoor games that still have rules and risk: carrom, cards, invented board games on paper. Do not narrate the learning while they play. “This is improving your motor skills” is how adults kill a game.
Tagore built Santiniketan in part because he trusted open air and the child’s own rhythm more than the drill of colonial classrooms. We put his face on the cover of school diaries and lock the compound during “study hours.” It is not too late to unlock it.
There’s a parallel here to the world of startups and entrepreneurship. Just as children learn through play, founders learn by doing, failing, and trying again. The best lessons for a founder often come not from a business school lecture but from the chaos of a real-world market. Similarly, a child learns not from a perfect worksheet but from the imperfect yet deeply engaging world of play.
In both cases, the path to competence is not linear and cannot be entirely structured. It requires the courage to step back and allow the chaos, trusting that, within it, lies the potential for real learning and growth. In my experience, whether in the clinic with patients or in mentoring founders, this holds true. Play is the original classroom, and its lessons are as relevant today as they were in the dusty lanes of our grandparents’ villages.