- What was the “aha” moment that made you realise that sports needed to be introduced to children as early as 0–5 years and through books?
Honestly, it wasn’t some big lightbulb moment in a boardroom. My nephew was 6 months old, and I was going through his bookshelf. His dad’s very into basketball, so he’d been gifted two books, “Goodnight Basketball” by Sports Illustrated, and a Michael Jordan book by Baby Ballers. That got me curious, so I started researching, and found that this entire category, sports books for toddlers, was being published only by US and UK publishers. Not one Indian publisher had touched it. And that’s the part that really got me: India is a country that breathes sports, cricket, football and many more, we idolise our cricketers like nowhere else, but we’re not introducing our kids to any of it early. We wait till they’re 6 or 8 to actually teach them a sport. Somebody had to be the first to fill that gap. So I figured, why not us.
- You call Little Athletes India’s first dedicated sports-themed board book series for toddlers. What gap in the Indian children’s publishing market were you trying to fill?
The gap was pretty simple, and honestly a bit embarrassing once you see it: there wasn’t a single Indian sports board book for the 0-5 age group before us. Not one. You’d walk into any bookstore and find beautifully done alphabet books, animal books, bedtime stories, all wonderful, but the moment a parent wanted something sports-themed for a toddler, every option on the shelf was imported, none of them Indian published.
We want to build something where a 3-4 year old can see a cricket stadium, a football field, a badminton court, and actually recognise it, because that’s the world they’re growing up in. It’s less about “we invented a new category” and more about “why it took this long for someone to write these books for our kids.”
- At a time when parents are increasingly concerned about screen time, how can storytelling become a gateway to movement, play and an active lifestyle?
SLook, screen time is the thing every parent’s stressed about right now, and honestly I get it. But I don’t think books need to fight screens, they’re just a completely different thing. You’re sitting with your kid, actual lap-time, turning pages together, pointing at stuff, doing the voices if you’re that kind of parent. That’s already miles away from a screen before you even get to what’s on the page. Now put a kid holding a bat or chasing a ball on that page, and you’re basically showing your toddler this is a thing they get to go do, not just watch. Reading becomes the warm-up before the actual play happens.
We’ve literally had parents message us saying their toddler picked up a toy bat after Little Cricketer and started swinging it around like the kid in the book. That’s the whole job done, honestly. The book was never the destination, it’s just the door to the ground.
- From a marketing perspective, how do you communicate the value of a sports book to parents when the child is too young to understand the concept of “sport”?
Honestly, we’re not selling to the child, we’re selling to the parent, and the parent already understands what sport means to them. So the pitch isn’t “your baby will learn cricket,” it’s “start something with your kid that you already love.” Most of our parents grew up watching cricket with their dads, playing football in a park somewhere, or badminton in the compound, early morning practice at the court, and we’re just tapping into that, letting them pass it down early instead of waiting.
If you ask me honestly, the emotional pitch beats the logical one every time. A parent buying one of our books isn’t thinking about cognitive development, they’re thinking about the day they take their kid to their first match, or their first game at the court.
- What have you learned about today’s Indian parents, what are they really looking for when they buy books, toys or learning products for their 0–5-year-olds?
Indian parents today aren’t buying on price, they’re buying on value. What they’re actually asking is whether the book will hold their kid’s attention off a screen, whether it’s something they can sit and read together, and whether it adds something real, or if it’s just going to sit on a shelf. If the answer’s yes, price barely matters.
And these parents do their homework. They check reviews, ask in parenting groups, before buying anything for a 0-5 year old. It’s rarely an impulse buy, even for something as small as a board book.
- Why do you think Indian children’s publishing is moving towards stories and experiences that feel more culturally familiar and rooted in everyday Indian life?
I believe parents now want stories that introduce their child to the real world, the world they’re actually going to be exposed to. Whether that’s our traditions, our festivals, or our sports. A parent is happy to buy a book on Ganesh Chaturthi around that time of year, something that tells their toddler what’s actually happening around them, why there’s a Ganpati at home, why everyone’s celebrating. Same thing during IPL season, a parent wants their child to have a cricket book in hand so that when they take them to a stadium, or even just watch a match at home, the child is already a little intrigued, already has some context.
Because parents are thinking this way now, the industry’s had to catch up, publishers are moving towards stories and experiences that actually feel like the child’s own life, not something borrowed from somewhere else.
- Can a board book do more than teach a child about a sport? How did you design Little Athletes to encourage parent-child interaction, imagination and physical play?
Yes, definitely. We designed it with three things in mind. For interaction, the rhyming verse matters, it’s easier for a parent to read aloud with rhythm and energy, which naturally pulls them into reading together rather than just narrating at the child. For imagination, we made sure the books have both male and female characters, so any child picking it up can actually see themselves as the one playing, not just watching someone else. And for physical play, we built in small touchpoints on the page, there’s a page in Little Footballer where the characters are celebrating and high-fiving, and we’ve had parents tell us their child claps the character’s hand directly on the page and smiles. So the book isn’t just teaching a sport, it’s designed to get read together, imagined into, and physically responded to.
- India has a massive sporting culture, but sports are often introduced to children much later. Do you see Little Athletes as part of a larger movement to make sport a natural part of childhood?
Yes, and to be clear, I’m not saying a 2-3 year old should be out there playing. I’m saying they can get familiar with it early, and familiarity builds confidence. When that same child eventually picks up a bat at 6 or 7, if cricket already feels familiar from a book, from watching, from hearing about it at home, it’ll feel like home the moment they’re on the field. They don’t need to understand the rules yet, they just need to feel like they belong there.
It’s not just the sport itself either. We’re working in the lessons that come with it too, showing up, that it’s okay to win and okay to lose, that giving up isn’t really an option. If a child gets exposed to that early, they handle it a lot better when they actually face it themselves.
So if familiarity is half the battle, we’re trying to win that half before the child even picks up their first bat or racquet.
- Building a category that parents may not immediately recognise must come with its own marketing challenges. How are you creating awareness and educating consumers around the idea of sports-themed books for toddlers?
The category we’re building, sports-themed books for toddlers, genuinely didn’t exist before us, so the challenge isn’t format, parents know exactly what a board book is, it’s that they’ve never had a reason to associate sport with something that young. So most of our job is making that one connection: sport isn’t something you introduce at 6, it can start as early as festivals or animals or colours do.
Offline does a lot of that work for us. When a parent sees our book in a play area their toddler already goes to, or on a shelf at Bahrisons or Sapna Book House, right next to books they already trust, the category explains itself in that moment, they don’t need a pitch, they just need the idea in front of them once.
The rest is repetition through the right voices. We send our books to mom influencers to review, because a parent trusts another parent’s opinion more than an ad, and we run educational content on our Instagram about why early sport exposure matters, so by the time someone sees the book, they’ve already absorbed the “why.”
- What is the larger vision for Little Dreamers Publishing and if Little Athletes succeeds, what could the future of early-childhood publishing in India look like?
The larger vision is for Little Dreamers to contribute towards being the content providers of real-life concepts and experiences for a child, sport is just where we started, not where we stop. If Little Athletes succeeds, I want us to be pioneers of this category the way certain publishers already lead in Indian folklore or festivals, when a parent thinks “sport for my toddler,” Little Dreamers should be the first name that comes to mind.
And we don’t see ourselves stopping at sport either. The same thinking can apply to so many other parts of a child’s world, travel, music, even professions, all things a toddler will eventually be exposed to but rarely gets introduced to this early. If we get this right, early-childhood publishing in India stops treating real-life experiences as one-off, occasional books and starts treating them as a real, built-out category kids grow up on.
