“I actually feel quite lucky because most children don't get to go to activities because they are poor; so, I am happy that I get to learn,” eight-year-old Anandi paused and said while talking to me about her assorted leisure pursuits. She attends a state primary school in a middle-class neighbourhood in West London where she lives with her parents (her mother is a medical doctor and her father, a management consultant) and her brother Chirag, who is four years her elder. On most weekdays after school, she takes part in speech and drama, swimming, and yoga lessons that are privately organised either in the school premises or in the nearby leisure centre. For her, it is all about ‘making new friends’ and getting to ‘learn new things’. In addition, she is fond of drawing in her spare time, playing badminton with her elder brother in their back garden and playing with her teddy bears before going to sleep. Encased in her enjoyment of these activities lies an awareness of how fortunate she is to have access to these opportunities that are simply not available to many children growing up both in her own city of London and in Ahmedabad, the city her parents grew up in and which she visits every summer, who cannot afford these activities. She is grateful that she is among those who can indulge in paid-for activities and toys, make new friends and learn new things by immersing in these spaces. Leisure therefore is key to how she relates to her social environment and her own location within it.

In her ethnography with both white and Black middle-class families in the United States, Lareau (2011: 2) concluded that participation in a plethora of organised activities instils ‘a robust sense of entitlement’ in the children. In Britain too, Reay (2010: 35) has written about the confidence and sense of entitlement that she found among middle-class parents as ‘emotional resources’ that they utilised in navigating institutional spaces and passed down to their children. The professional middle-class British Indian parents I interviewed, and whose voices we heard in the last chapter, did exhibit a sense of confidence in the way they managed their children's education and leisure lives, and their children too were extremely articulate and confident in their responses to my questions.