How Kerala produces champions

It’s 6 am and I am on a bus to a hamlet where, in a lovely little home with low doors and tiny windows, now alas demolished, Dad was born a hundred years ago in mid-June 1923.  The bus stops by the turn on the road and I get off to walk the distance to the ancient village temple.  With its long outer walls – kept in immaculate condition – and neat little garden and the silence within but for soft invocation, the temple exudes an olde world charm.  A rush of memories, now tinted sepia and fraying at the edges.  Leave Time in a bag at the door.  And take the shirt off too, tucking in the tummy instinctively, for you want to present your best self in Higher Company. 

 

Beyond the back wall is the large temple pond that I haven’t seen in years, so, a while later, I walk up to take a look.  A man in a corner washes his dhoti, another shoots the breeze, yet in the pond a dozen children are swimming.  Not thrashing around and gasping or gulping water down or chasing each other around but Swimming, I emphasise, with practiced ease across the exhausting length of the pond - that must be about a couple of hundred metres -, skilled technique, speed and grace in evidence. Some swimmers are wearing snorkels and are slower, others tear freestyle through the water. A couple of coaches are instructing more kids by the side, and, heartwarmingly, there is an equal number of boys and girls.  I am a swimmer too, but I can see that I am in Higher Company here as well, these kids are pros and this spectacle of open-access, professional training is awesome, absolutely extraordinary.

At the tea shop by the temple, I see a poster of the champions this little village of Kakkayur has produced and at my cousin’s lovely old home a few steps away – now in its 101st year – I meet a grand-niece and nephew just back from an hour in the pond, now heading to junior school.  Their favourite stroke, I am informed, is the butterfly (I admit immediate defeat and swallow all remaining pride).  How much do you pay for your coaching? I ask.  About a hundred rupees a month, my cousin replies with a shrug.  
And that is how this village has produced champions.  

And those champions have won medals and jobs as coaches abroad, in the army and the railways.  And some champions have returned to produce more of their kind from this little hamlet.  I remember that one of them grew up in this very house, next to the temple.

We have the best team in Kerala, my cousin says with pride and a fetching smile and, while she just might have stretched a point there, what can be more inspiring than to know that you live amidst coconut and palm trees, fine paddies and finer champions, all in a little hamlet of the winding road to the hills of the Neliyampathis?  

..err. there was a toddy shop right there, once upon a time and path to it that was made for walking....