Impact of Leisure on Quality of Life and Social Development: Reflection on Urban India

Quality of life has been vital for social development of a community. Earlier it was economic development, now it is a social development with better quality of life. Today, quality of life include safe existence, healthy life, non exploitative free thinking and good education with awareness and of course good and quality leisure. The creative utilization of leisure has been crucial to social development. Urban India has been accustomed with leisure in various manners. Traditionally people took pleasure in performing rituals, meeting kin and relatives or going for a pilgrimage. Of late things have changed. People have started combining leisure with pilgrimage, kinship with pilgrimage and so on. The present paper analyses a few cases taken in this regard in the City of Lucknow. It is clearly pointing out to the fact are in urban India the affluent section have more opportunity for creative utilization of leisure but in practice they do not avail it, whereas, the lower strata neither have avenues nor have financial support for creative utilization of leisure because they lack an average quality of life.