Fatema Agarkar talks to The Sunday Guardian about the Agarkar Centre of Excellence (ACE), an initiative she started with her husband Ajit Agarkar, and how career in sports has an investable future. Excerpts:
Q. What all did it take to convert the idea of amalgamating sports and education into the formation of ACE?
A. Given the expertise that we both have, i.e., Ajit Agarkar with sports and my journey with education, it just feels like a seamless journey. We are passionate about making sure that children benefit from being exposed to sports as opposed to how it was previously. For us, it was all about bringing expertise and experience together.
Q. What is your vision for driving the ACE initiative in 2021?
A. We want to ensure that we expose children to a lot more opportunities through sports that weren’t present in the physical world as the virtual world today has exposed children to so many opportunities. We at ACE are pro-blended learning. It is simply about optimising the virtual space.
Q. What would you like to say to the parents who think that devoting more time to sports means compromising on academics?
A. Think about sports as a career as these are the careers of today and tomorrow and if you do a comparative analysis, traditional careers are not lucrative anymore. You have to invest in it and the child has to be talented, he/she will have to have that skill and that’s why parents need to go to the right academy so the child gets mentored by the right people. Having said that, a career in sports has an investable future.
Q. What all key values do sports inculcate in children?
A. All of the life skills that we talk about in education—discipline, commitment, balance, decision-making, time-management, relationship-management, and teamwork. For me, sport is an education in itself!
Q. Do you believe that during these testing times it becomes even more important for children to engage in some form of physical activity to cope up with the stress of online classes?
A. Absolutely! There has to be a physical side to it, only because the current lifestyle is sedentary and children need to have that physical fitness, depending on their building, society, the neighbourhood but one can still focus on physical fitness at home, one doesn’t need to go to the gym to be exposed to that kind of fitness. One can simply manage on a yoga mat, it is very important and should become a part of their daily routine.
Q. Do you agree that the right coaching and mentorship from an early age along with proper sports infrastructure can give India more sportspersons?
A. Yes, we as a nation need to promote that and we need to invest in that, whether it is government or private bodies, I think it is important to consider sports as an integral part of children’s growing up years. We are from Mumbai, we work with smaller schools with limited infrastructure but we need to think beyond it, we need to plan simply because this is the future. Hence, it is important to invest in it and utilise that infrastructure.
Q. Would you like to comment on the reform measures required to further boost the Indian sports ecosystem?
A. The hope is that a lot more people and many stakeholders think about sports as an investment, build capabilities. The pandemic taught us one thing that we were not prepared to go virtual and I am just hoping that we are better prepared for the future if we are all in it together and consider investing in better sporting facilities and infrastructure. We build capabilities and currently, we are not there and it is not just schools, it’s the government. It is that vision that says our kids can play more and for that, we will have-to-have such facilities.