Giving Mumbai slickers a taste of the great outdoors

For the past five years, at Empower Activity Camps, a 50-acre resort and campsite in Kolad, three hours away from Mumbai, Brigadier Sushil Bhasin has been helping thousands of children cross their perceived limits, one challenge at a time.

However, an ex-army man with 34 years of experience in training men for war, Brigadier Bhasin’s greatest challenge has been convincing parents and schools that real education lies outside the classroom.

From building a raft from scratch to advancing through an obstacle course, a Making a Difference (MAD) camp promises children the experience of an army boot camp coupled with adventure sports such as rock climbing, lake-crossing, flying fox, zorbing, paintball and whitewater rafting.

But it’s not all fun and games, at least not for the professionally trained instructors who watch the children interact with one another. 

“Kids quickly learn the art of looking good in front of the teacher or their parents. Here, their guard is down and they’re just having fun,” says Brigadier Bhasin, a proponent of experiential learning which emphasises learning based on one’s own experience.

“As they face their fears, kids realise how easily they succumb to peer pressure or how often they under-estimate themselves,” he explains. Apart from asking kids to fill up individual reflection sheets after every activity, video shots are taken of the children doing the tasks and then played back to them. Discussions that emerge throw up meaningful insights, ranging from the importance of working as a team to staying focused to accomplish one’s goal.

But does the thought of sending your child away for an entire week bother you? Instructors at Empower point out that with 50-60 activities packed into seven days and spread across an open landscape, children shake off their homesickness sooner than expected. This is despite the fact that the area has poor mobile connectivity and there isn’t a television in sight.

“Urban kids spend their lives in boxes, whether it’s the idiot box, the X-box or the inbox. Here, for the first time, they just let loose and play like nothing else matters — a rare sight these days,” says Neelu Grover, chief camp co-ordinator.

Brigadier Bhasin agrees, saying, “We get the most thrills watching kids do things their parents and teachers would normally think they couldn’t do on their own.”