 Hello and let's talk about the right to play. As we know, all major sport activity has been shut down after the COVID-19 pandemic. But is that all sport is about? One of the greatest casualties of the pandemic has been the playground. We often discuss in my new detail the millions of dollars lost in tournaments and the fate of various leagues and cups and championships. But what about the everyday experience of millions of children across the world? What about the vanishing of that space which is such an integral part of childhood? When will parents and children feel safe to go back to the playgrounds as they used to? We talk to NewsClick's Leslie Xavier on this issue. Thank you, Leslie, for joining us. So everyone is talking about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the big tournaments, on the careers of star sportsmen, a lot of the drama, a lot of the competition across the world is now kind of vanished from our memories, at least for some of us so to speak. But the aspect not many people are really talking about is that sport is not just the big tournaments, the glamour and the glitter. It's also for all of us something that happens very often on very humble grounds and more importantly for children too. So could you talk a bit about why this aspect needs to be focused much more rather than just the big tournaments which of course need to be talked about but it's not only about that. So the major narrative that has been doing the rounds around the sporting world is restart of big tournaments. They seem to have this understanding that sport is all about spectatorship and also all about the pro athletes who have to display their skills and win matches and break records and all that. But what is forgotten here is the basic beginnings of sport. What is sport? Sport is all about play. Sport is all about being out there and enjoying and taking part in a very social exertion. For many communities it is as much like a festival in itself, in villages if you look at it, in India if you look at it, if you go to Coorg or some other place, Coorg is known for its local hockey and it is a big festival over there. So in society sport has a larger role to play than watching it on TV and cheering for your team and all this stuff. It builds a kind of bond, it builds a kind of uniform identity which is impossible without sport. But on a larger scale sport also has a role in building society because the future of our world lies in our children and children's well-being and development has a lot to do with a well-rounded development I mean, has a lot to do with education no doubt, being in the classroom no doubt but at the same time being in the playground as well because it has been proven via many studies by psychologists, child psychologists, educational psychologists, physiologists and many, many scientific, many in the scientific community. How sport and playing sport or learning via playing is important for the child's development. In young infants, in toddlers, playing is an integral part in developing the main cognitive centers of the brain. This has been studied by neurologists and proven. And as you go higher in age, sport teaches them how to interact socially, how to understand the dynamics of social interaction, dynamics of personality development, dynamics of themselves, what they are capable of, how do you deal with their capabilities and capabilities, how to deal with victories and losses. These are all big things that the adult world actually grappled with. And the foundation for dealing with all these things starts from the playground, starts from childhood and starts from the playground. So the right to play is something that many organizations across the world who work in child welfare have been pushing for it including the UNICEF. And it is, I mean, UNICEF is very clear in its directives when they have listed out the advantages and the need to uphold this right. But sadly, if you look at this pandemic or for instance, any crisis situation, be it war situations, be it conditions like in countries like Syria or Iraq, or be it the Ebola virus when it came out in Africa and now this pandemic COVID-19 across the world, the first and foremost right that is taken away is the right to play. So the key aspect here is that sport is not just an instrumental thing. It's not only about, say, achieving success or looking at it from a very professional aspect. There's a lot of parents these days do. Or looking at it as something for career development or personality development. It has an intrinsic value of its own. Yeah, it is. So it's not about the end result. It's much like the saying goes that it's not about the destination but about the trip, about the journey that you're made. The same thing applies to sport because sport is all about being in the moment too. So there is a lot of nostalgia trip that is happening in the sports fans community now, people watching the old football matches, people watching 1970s Dutch football team or the Maradona, the famous Maradona team from the 80s or any sporting action for that matter. But the biggest memories or the biggest memories that make you smile around sport would be from your childhood playground. The friendships that has been forged, the moments that has shown you where you stand sometimes in athletic ability, sometimes in the pecking order of childhood which is very, I mean, which is funny, which is fun but which is also part of a development curve which hits, when it hits Adelthu, it basically translates into that from childhood to Adelthu. So the value of sport beyond pursuing it as a professional career, like for instance, the millions of academies that bring out, churn out youngsters to mold them into football professional career or cricketers or Virat Kohli or Lionel Messi. But when you look at all the superstars that has come out in football or cricket also to a large extent, it all starts from the neighbourhood playground. Lionel Messi was identified in Rosario, not in an academy but the way he was touching and kicking the ball around his house. Cristiano Ronaldo, street football. Any athlete for that matter. So that is actually a corollary, a byproduct of that sporting expression but the bigger picture is playground and play adds value to the child's existence, child's growth in ways which is difficult to fathom but also understandable. So what is happening now with this lockdown is that there have been many debates going on how education is happening from home. Online systems are in place for classrooms to take place but there is no system in place for the kids to explore that other learning aspect which is equally important which is to play. So parents tend to figure out because kids obviously are bundles of energy and they get hyper, parents have to go about their job, their daily chores at home and manage this and that so they tend to figure out that exertion and expending of that extra energy is key to keep the child calm without understanding that it's not about exercise that is a wrong idea that we have physiologically as adults because we tend to see sport or play or exercise as expending the calories that we add while having that pizza or a burger but that's science but that's not how children that's not how children take children play in different ways children can play just with a bucket and go out and play with water children can play in the sand they can dig up and dig a hole and play with that they can go stones and play they can just pluck mangoes and that's play for them climb trees and that's play for them that's gymnastics. So being out there is important that this aspect and again it's let's just be very clear that the pandemic is a serious thing we are not I mean I am not advocating that the kids should be going out and playing out in the open risking themselves because it's a very serious situation now but this has to be addressed in a very constructive way how to go about it. I'll give you an example of Sweden and Sweden is not comparable to India for sure but or across the world many countries but one of the first things now was that controlled lockdown kind of a situation there is giving directives to neighborhoods and communities to allow kids to be out in the open while observing the necessary sanitary precautions. So I have a friend who runs a karate academy in one of the Swedish cities and he put out a video a couple of days back about is Dojo being shifted to a parking lot in the neighborhood so that no touching of surfaces no closed environment where this but then kids get to play it's about kids being out in the open kids exploring. And I mentioned Ebola virus earlier so in Africa when the outbreak happened one of the biggest instruments that all these agencies including UNICEF or eight agencies who were working in child welfare at that point used was the playground to teach kids about the precautions that they need to take to ward off infection and also to cope with losses many of them lost their parents or their primary caretaker and all that so sport taught them to deviate to see the brighter picture to be among peers to laugh to smile and be in that moment and then overcome that grief and look ahead to something better so that that's the larger power that is at play so all these factors need to be taken into account when we talk about I mean sport in general because sport's role is not just being on TV and letting old people sit around the TV and watch and cheer for the team as a larger sociological role to play which has been ignored and I would urge the authorities to take this into account when they are devising policies to open up the society in a systematic manner in the coming months Thank you Leslie so much for talking to us In our next segment we bring you a conversation between writer and academic Vijay Prasad and the playwright V the author of the vagina monologues on the pandemic in the United States and the racism and the invisible genocide that is taking place there You also say in another very evocative phrase you say what kind of mutiny is possible in a quarantine you know it's true that rebellion is on the streets and you are quite correct to say this touchless future is the fantasy of you know the fascists in a way and yet in the United States it's the far right that's on the streets saying end the lockdown give us a sense of the context of Trump this disease, the lockdown the fact that there are people on the streets saying please let us go out and infect each other it's just so hard to even try to articulate what is going on in the madness of America right now because it's mad but again if you even look they even the crazy right wingers know that the way to have power is to be in the present with your body on the steps of the Michigan State House right with your AK-47s by the way amassed I mean just imagine if any person of color or black person showed up with that what would happen I mean it's astounding what world of racism inequality we are living in right now I mean Michael Flynn got free today his case got dropped today I mean every moment we see these extreme extreme inequalities of power and justice but I think what's happening in this country is on one hand it's just utterly terrifying I think the kind of manifestation of white supremacy which is of course been here forever but now has a special agent at the top boiling it and cooking it and catalyzing it and inviting it and celebrating it as far as I can tell he's unleashed all these forces that have been here I think what's really disturbing me is to see the way we are killing off black people brown people and poor people and are essential workers and they are often one in the same right and I've been doing a lot of work with women workers and nurses and restaurant workers and farmers and just we're doing this regular show really trying to look at what is happening to women workers in this country and I think what I'm very very disturbed by is to see this kind of invisible genocide that is operating right now what we call pre-existing conditions right which are kind of synonymous with systematic oppressions so that you look at what are pre-existing conditions that are killing people well environmental degradation where people live in neighborhoods where they are more susceptible to asthma and so this disease is hurting them diabetes where people don't have the right kind of foods to eat what's a pre-existing condition like as all this is going on the right wing is busily eroding women's rights and desecrating abortion rights all over the place what's another pre-existing condition is like their desire to destroy and extract the earth to death so we're seeing the complete deregulation of lands and parks and places that should be preserved and I think what I am hoping is happening is that people are waking up to understand that we are living in a country where capitalism and the kind of racist patriarchal capitalism has reached a peak I hope it's a peak because if it goes beyond this we'll all be dead where we have to now make a decision that whatever door this is opening whatever world this is opening cannot be a world governed by profits over people commodity over care where we have to start saying who is actually saving our lives right now who are the people who are keeping us able those of us who are privileged enough to shelter in place you know it's the workers it's the farmers it's the grocery people it's the janitors it's the nurses it's the aids it's the doctors it's the people who if you eat meat who are working in the poultry plants and the meat plants and those are the people who in my opinion have always been holding this country together and have been the least appreciated the most underpaid the most undervalued the most under cherished and the most unseen and what I hope is that this is the time where that's all going to change where we are now going to understand that the people who are most essential have to be the most valued and the most paid and the most cherished and the most protected because what we're doing to nurses I don't know if you saw the demonstration today at the White House where the nurses went and put their all the shoes of the 88 nurses who have already died in this country who didn't need to die all those women were sent into slaughter or mainly women were sent into slaughter without PPEs without any protective gear without masks there was no reason for that to happen in a country as rich as the United States absolutely no reason except for lack of thought lack of care lack of consideration and lack of love and respect for the people who are keeping us alive I mean I think that's very beautifully said and I know that on social media I've been watching you lifting up the stories of people who are you know the workers who hold things together particularly people in the health field but you know there's a way in which every time there's a tragedy or an emergency we call people in these fields essential workers and then a kind of amnesia sets in when things go back to normal there's a real forgetting I know that you're trying to make the forgetting impossible but how is this going to be fought in the realm of culture to make people not forget it's such a good question you know we've been working for years on this thing in one billion rising called women workers rising where we've been doing lots of work trying to build coalitions with women workers across various sectors and I think like you said there's moments where people will rise up and they'll care and then of course but I think now actually what I hope and you know I'm endlessly optimistic I'm one of those beckett people I can't go on I will go on I must go on but I feel like I do believe something has kind of shattered people's denial in this moment even these beautiful things that are happening every night in New York where people are banging their pots and pans and appreciating workers every day something's going into the consciousness that has to be altering the way people see things and you know I was reading the story the other day of this beautiful woman who works on the MTA she's a conductor on the trains her story just really devastated me how she was going to work every day and of course they had no protective gear and they gave him these shoddy masks that didn't work and there were no bathrooms that had water to wash her hands and of course she got sick and she got sick for two weeks and when she came back there were beautiful workers who she had loved were missing and she said you know like we do our jobs, we like our jobs we don't hate our jobs we actually like the work we do but we want to be respected for the work we do we want to be honored for the work we do and we want to be cared for like everybody else and she wasn't saying like I hate my job I don't want to be doing this I think part of what we have to do is to live in a culture in a society where we respect each other equally where we honor the work that people do and we pay for that work and we value that work or do we want to keep in this awfully hierarchical capitalist structure where people are they're basically are seen as kind of slaves to the ruling class to their bidding be sacrificed at the altar they're not essential workers they're sacrificial workers and they'll just be thrown out there and for the very very very small 1% or even 0.1% who is willing to sacrifice everybody for their pleasures and for their advancement and I don't know I don't think I've ever felt more strongly in this moment turn our reality away from this very very very small section of people owning the world at the expense of the majority of people who are making the world happen and giving their lives for the world to happen without care and without sustenance and without love, really that's all we have time for today keep watching Newsclick