At Makkala Hubba this year, somewhere between a child piecing together a map of Bengaluru and another tracing butterflies across a wall, a small but significant moment took place. The Playbook of Play was launched by Rohini Nilekani, within the flow of the festival itself.
The choice of setting mattered. This was not a closed-room launch or a formal unveiling. It happened in a space already alive with movement, sound, and interaction, where children were not being guided step by step but were moving through experiences on their own terms. The playbook entered that environment as something that had emerged from similar thinking, not as a separate intervention.
Developed as part of EkStep Foundation’s Bachpan Manao initiative, the Playbook of Play draws from a simple but often overlooked idea that the early years of childhood are shaped less by formal instruction and more by the everyday environments children inhabit. The way a space is arranged, the time adults are willing to give, the materials available to touch and transform, and the freedom to move without constant correction all play a role in how children learn.
What the playbook does is bring these elements together in a way that can travel. It gathers practices, prompts, and ways of thinking that can be adapted across different contexts, whether in homes, anganwadis, schools, neighbourhood groups, or public spaces. It does not position itself as a fixed curriculum. Instead, it works more like a guide that people can return to, reinterpret, and reshape based on the children and communities they are working with.
At Makkala Hubba, this approach could be seen in real time. The installations across Freedom Park were not designed around outcomes or completion. They invited children to linger, to try something out, to leave and come back, to engage with materials in ways that were not always predictable. Adults, too, found themselves adjusting their role, often stepping back, sometimes joining in, occasionally just observing.
The playbook sits close to this way of working. It recognises that play is not a break from learning but one of its primary forms, especially in the first eight years. It also acknowledges that play does not happen in isolation. It depends on the presence and participation of caring adults, on the availability of time, and on environments that are responsive rather than restrictive.
There is also a broader intention behind it. Through Bachpan Manao, the effort has been to make early childhood more visible in public life, to move it beyond private spaces and into shared conversations and collective responsibility. The playbook becomes one way of doing that, offering a resource that can be picked up by different people across the city and beyond.
This is where its connection to Makkala Hubba becomes clearer. If the Hubba created a concentrated, ten-day experience where a city could gather around childhood, the playbook extends that possibility outward. It allows the ideas, practices, and energy of the festival to move into other spaces, at different scales, over a longer period of time.
In that sense, the launch was not just about introducing a document. It was about placing it back into the kind of environment it speaks to, one where children are already playing, adults are already participating, and learning is already unfolding in ways that are not always named but are deeply felt.
The playbook carries that forward, not by asking for replication, but by inviting people to notice what is already present and to build from there.
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