NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 10 The kabaddi rulebook — LET'S EXPLORE

If there had been no official rulebook, the dispute would have had no honest way of ending. The two captains would each have insisted on their own version; the referee's word could have been challenged as personal opinion; the match might have been stopped, replayed, or awarded by shouting rather than by rule. The team that was stronger, louder or better connected would have won the argument — not the team that was actually right.

What is required for everyone to abide by the rulebook:

• The rules must be written down and public before the match, not invented during it.
• They must be the same for both teams — no special rule for the favourites.
• Everyone must have agreed to them in advance, so that following them is a promise already given.
• There must be a neutral person — the referee — with the authority to apply them.
• The rules must be seen as fair; people obey rules willingly when they believe the rules protect them too.

If the captains refused to refer to the rulebook at all, the game would collapse into a quarrel. There would be no way to decide who won, the tournament could not continue, and future matches would be pointless because no result could be trusted.

How to do this activity: pick one game the whole class knows — gilli-danda, kho-kho, langdi, cricket in the gully. Each group writes down the rules exactly as it plays them (do not correct them yet). Present, compare, then argue your way to one shared set. Write the final set on a chart and put it on the wall.

Sample answer: our group chose gully cricket.

The challenges we faced in reaching consensus:

• Every group thought its own habit was the ‘real’ rule, simply because it had always played that way.
• Some rules quietly favoured whoever proposed them — the bat owner batting first, for instance.
• The strong players wanted strict rules and the beginners wanted flexible ones.
• A few disputes had no neutral judge, so both sides felt cheated.
• Getting everyone to give up something was the hardest part — consensus needs compromise.

The rulebook for a country is its constitution. As the chapter says immediately after this question: “Our Constitution is something like a rulebook for the country.”

How it would be made — and how ours actually was made:

Notice what makes it a rulebook rather than an order: it is drawn up by the people through their representatives, not handed down by a king or an outside power. That single sentence is what the Preamble's opening words — ‘WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA’ — are saying.