We don’t need no summer camp

One would have thought that the point of being a six-year-old child is not having to worry about your personality, or terrorism. All that was strictly grown-up stuff last time somebody checked. Not anymore, it seems. And surely not in the world of summer camps where it is compulsory for all kids to have fun while they develop their personalities and kill terrorists.

Yes, it’s that time of the year when parents would do anything to keep kids out of their hair, including packing them off to summer camps. Take Class VI student Hetvi Lapasia, for instance. Her daily schedule can make an average CEO seem like a loafer. Her non-vacation day goes like this: early morning school from 7am to 1pm, followed by a hurried lunch, and then a six-hour-long tuition for all subjects. The evening is spent completing school homework. Then it’s early to bed so that she can wake up in time for school the next day. But since this isn’t taxing enough, she has summer vacations to make up for it.

She has already enrolled for a swimming camp in the morning, craft in the afternoon and has plans to learn tennis in the evening. When does she find the time to play? “After 11pm in the night.” Luckily, her mother Jigna Lapasia does not object. “After all, she needs some play time, too,” she says, adding: “My daughter gets cranky if she has nothing to do. These summer camps keep her occupied and she learns something in the bargain.”

While Hetvi will, doubtless, learn a lot during a hectic summer, Mayank Kanti will be busy developing his six-year-old personality. His bags are already packed for a 15-day personality development-cum-adventure trail in Darjeeling, which will be followed by horse-riding classes in Pune. The camps not only keep him busy through the vacation but also give his parents a break. “We are both working and live in a nuclear family. We don’t trust house help to take care of Mayank. We are at least sure of his safety at the summer camps,” says his mother. “We also want him to learn horse riding,” she adds. After rattling off how the camps will help him develop “leadership skills,” Mayank confesses he wouldn’t mind just playing cricket at the maidan.

Summer camps have come a long way since the YMCA started it all, back in the 1970s. A bunch of volunteers would accompany children for a weekend trail to a forest on the outskirts of Mumbai. Today, there is every kind of camp for every Indian child. Kids can learn to cook, speak Japanese (or any other language of choice), paint, recycle plastic, study bugs and insects, develop personality, learn table manners, save money, and also combat terrorists.

Brightly packaged, with coloured brochures and exciting promises, summer camps have become a lucrative business. Anybody who can swim, draw, sing, dance or has a farmhouse to spare is making sure they don’t miss the opportunity to make hay while the sun shines. The Creative Mind Academy in Nerul markets itself as a personality development class.

“It is not a fun-activity module. It is a class where children are groomed,” says Gurmeet Garha, head of the Academy. The classes are for 15 days at a stretch, three hours a day. “The end result is polished and presentable individuals,” he adds. The students are taught how to eat with a fork and spoon, how to attend a telephone call, and “basic etiquette.” Garha also conducts shloka sessions with meditation and mind power games to build IQ. Clinical psychologist Varkha Chulani agrees that ‘basic etiquette’ is important, but she is doubtful whether talking on the phone in a prescribed manner will build personality.

Gautam Benegal has been battling hard to save his 10-year-old son, Anand, from washing up in these camps under the tidal wave of peer pressure. “Right before the examinations, various pamphlets are plastered all over the school. Even his school has started summer camp classes within school. All his friends will be going to one. How can I prevent my son from being influenced by all this?” he complains. He remembers a specific camp where all of Anand’s friends returned dehydrated and with sunburns. “Most of these camps are not run by experts. They rarely have a doctor on board. In any case, a summer camp is a British concept; there is no need to ape it,” says Benegal.
Apart from sending out camp invitations through emails, pamphlets are often discreetly slipped in by newspaper vendors so that they bite you at the breakfast table. Or they are taped in train compartments by volunteers. Most of these merely mention the activity and a contact number. “I have heard of the most bizarre camps this year,” says Benegal.
One that fits Benegal’s description of “bizarre” is the Terrorist Combat Camp organised by 28029adventures, a camping company that has no scruples about riding piggyback on the recent terror attacks in the city. Jayant Dofey, organiser and ex-air force pilot, wants to teach 10-14-year-olds how to combat terrorists if stuck in a terror situation, and if need be, how to “kill them”.

Chulani is appalled at the idea. “Such a camp will inculcate the wrong idea in kids that all terrorists need to be killed off. How do you ensure that these children won’t use similar tactics against their peers?” She stresses that summer camps today are more like crèches. “Summer camps can provide children with great experiences, but they need to be used in moderation,” she says. Keeping the children busy at all times is a new age phenomenon, which does not give the child space to think, she says. “This is an overly stimulated generation that gets cranky if it isn’t kept occupied. That’s why you will always see them chatting online or skipping channels. A holiday is a holiday at the end of the day,” she says.

However, there are, thankfully, kids lucky enough of be left alone by their parents. If you walk into Bandra’s MTNL colony, you might run into a bunch of them having an interactive session with the ghost that lives in the local banyan tree. “Everybody here believes that tree is haunted. Nobody comes near it,” whispers Malaika Chawla. She and her friends roll up newspapers to use them as pillows and they lie under the tree to gaze at stars every night. Last summer, they sat around the majestic banyan, played Tarzan by hanging on its roots, and made up stories of headless creatures. “The summer is a holiday. Why would we want to waste it on some tiring camp?” asks Nikita Ahvazhagan.

This year too, the gang at MTNL colony is following a strict no-summer-camp policy. “We plan to take care of the strays we have adopted, see which one of us can hang by the monkey bars the longest, and go cycling near the Reclamation every morning,” says Nikita.