Culture
The Transformative Power of Play in Urban India
As urbanization shrinks places for recreation, Project KHEL finds new uses for slices of neighborhoods, parks, and fields and uses sports to introduce life skills to underserved kids.
On a pleasant spring evening in March, a group of about 20 children from the Husadiya slum in Lucknow, a north Indian city, have congregated in a vacant plot opposite a flyover. Everybody opens their arms, thrusts out their chest, and imitates a crow in flight.
The kids, ages 7 to 14, do this every Wednesday and Saturday. It’s part of their session with Project KHEL (Kids Holistic Education and Lifeskills), an NGO that leverages the power of sports to captivate and empower India’s marginalized youth. Rohit Srivass, their facilitator, whom the kids call bhaiyya (or “elder brother”), begins each session with a song to help kids loosen up.