On a sweaty evening at the Veera Tamilars Academy of Boxing and Silambam in Burma Colony, Tiruchirapalli, somewhere a phone is buzzing non-stop. Training for an international tournament coming up in February, boxer Aravinda Prakash though has no time to check the notifications. The 24-year-old pugilist is wrapped in gloves and gumshields at the boxing gym.
“I started boxing at age 13 at the school level in 2013,” says Prakash, who won his first major title—a gold at the Indo Thailand Goodwill Rural Games International Boxing Championship—in 2018 in Bangkok. He has won five international games consecutively since.
In October this year, he took part in the international professional boxing trials at Indore, which paved the way for the championship being organised by the Indian Boxing Council (IBC) in Singapore, next February. The organisation has been working with boxing bodies in countries like Bangladesh and Nepal with an aim to set up ‘regional cooperation in pro boxing’.
Hailed as Trichy’s first global boxing star, Prakash, however, credits the rising popularity of the game in the south to the cinema—especially Vijay Deverakonda’s action movie Liger, and Irudhi Suttru, a 2016 sports film directed by Sudha Kongara.
“Every time a film focuses on boxing, I get many inquiries on where to learn it,” says the boxer, who took up the game professionally in 2016 with the hope that it would someday land him a “defence job”.
This local hero opened the Aravind Prakash Boxing Academy in 2020 to train underprivileged kids for free. “Two of my students, Sunil Venkat and R Kamlesh, have won state-level tournaments,” says the proud coach.
In order to focus on his training, however, Prakash has taken a break from teaching but plans to reopen the academy in 2023. Preparing for the same, he underwent two months of training in February at the Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports in Patiala and became a Sports Authority of India-certified coach.
With his eyes set on winning the Singapore championship, he gamely tackles the hurdles in his way. “Boxing can be an expensive sport,” says the fighter, who moonlights as the branch manager at Toni & Guy, a salon and spa outlet in town.
Arranging for finances is still tough. A boxer needs upwards of Rs 15,000 a month towards a coaching fee, a protein-rich diet, besides gear for the tournaments. For now, Prakash is being sponsored by his college alumnus, who owns a garment retail store in Trichy.
“My college senior, who likes to stay anonymous, has been sponsoring me since 2018,” says Prakash, who hopes that a gold medal at the Singapore tournament would get him more sponsors. What’s his ambition? “I want to follow my idol Vijender Singh and strike gold at the Olympics,” he says with confidence.