KOCHI: On one sunny Sunday morning six years ago, a TNIE lensman snapped Major General (retired) Jacob Koshy swinging his club at the tee box on the rolling fairways of the Cochin Golf Club, Bolgatty Island.
The picture was splashed above fold on the Monday edition of the newspaper. Koshy, the chief advisor of CIAL Golf and Country Club, considers that a watershed moment.
“CIAL manager rang me up on Monday around noon and asked me if I could draw up a design for the CIAL golf course. I agreed on one condition that all my work will be on an honorarium basis. They pounced on the offer. The rest is... as the cliché goes... history,” he jests.
But his romance with golf was no love at first sight. It began during his Indian Military Academy days in Dehradun in 1958 when one of his senior Gentlemen Cadet Corporal Chawla made him clean the former’s golf club.
“He was so impressed with the job that he told me to chip in for a game. It was quite a revelation for me. There was more to the game that what met the eye. I meticulously learnt the courtesies and manners to follow while playing golf. More importantly, he taught me the ethics of the game. He was killed in the 1965 operation,’’ Jacob wistfully reminisces.
Koshy is no run-of-the-mill golfer. A mechanical engineering graduate, he pursued his masters from IIT, Karaghpur. His date with golf courses took shape while he was still in the force. He gave shape to the first golf course in Leh, and Darbuk - which was the highest battlefield back in 1972, prior to Siachen.
He is so hooked to the game that he recounts with a chuckle that he had once named a hole in a tee map after his wife Shyama.
Ask him about the travails behind designing and developing the only 18-hole all-weather golf course in Kerala, which is now attracting avid golfers and tourists alike, he beams with contentment and unwinds: “It was surreal. We had to develop the course on 130 acres of rolling green with a length of 7,200 yards. Fastidious planning was done. We applied the most pragmatic problem solving technique - the system analysis. It helped reduce cost and maximize efficacy. We completed the project at `30 crore, which is less than one-thirds of the industry cost estimated at a whopping 100 crore. Besides, we were hell-bent in sourcing only indigenously available raw materials, which further helped taper the overhead cost.”
At 77, he is optimistic about the prospects of golf in Kerala.
“Golf is no more the game of regalia. From an elitist pastime, it’s fast capturing the imagination of people from all walks of life. The one in CIAL is a walk-in golf course. Non-members can also play after paying a green fee. The day is not far when public golf courses - fully-owned by government - (like in UK and the US) will take shape and democratise the game. I hope to cross paths with a rickshawala on the rolling greens soon,” he says.