Some people are lucky to spend a lifetime in their city of birth. Others shift cities by choice or compulsion. While adults worry more about their comfort zones, children view it through their own lens, and seek just their backyards and activity centres.
Swati Roy and M Venkatesh, who established the children’s book store, Eureka in 2003 in Delhi, and five years later created Bookaroo, a festival of children’s literature, started writing The Time Has Come – A story About The Future before the pandemic struck. It took them three years to complete a well-thought out illustrative format, because their aim is to highlight to young readers, between the ages of nine and 12 years, how and why it is important to make any and every city liveable.
Irrespective of where we are born, grow up, study, work and live, the cities we embrace are essentially of two types: the ordinary and the extraordinary ones. And town planners, says Swati, too have parameters to rate a city as child-friendly. Venkatesh explains it as the Popsicle Test. If a child can walk to a neighbourhood store, buy a popsicle and return home before it melts, the city, according to urban planners and architects is child-friendly. The popsicle test is further extended to include: if a child can walk safely to a neighbourhood library and finds a book of his choice, he adds.
