CHENNAI: Gymnastics?
Any other parent would have been at least a little bit surprised, if not downright shocked, when informed of their daughter’s desire to take to gymnastics, but Dulal Karmakar was not. After all, they were in isolated Agartala, where the sport, far away from the pruning influences of the mainland, had flourished like a wild shrub. This was the city where Mantu Debnath, the first Indian gymnast to make a mark on the world stage, when he surprised USSR’s Olympic medal hopes at a cultural meet in 1969, was born.
This was the city that had contributed a number of national champions including Bisweswar Nandi, who would eventually coach his daugther. “Gymnastics in Agartala was, and is, like cricket and football and cricket elsewhere. So when a young kid wants to become a gymnast, it is hardly surprising,” Dulal says.
So when his three-year-old daughter Dipa decided she wanted to be a gymnast, Dulal was neither surprised nor fazed. A Sports Authority of India weightlifting coach, Dulal knew where exactly to take her. “Soma Nandi was my colleague and that’s where I took her. Dipa, at that age, had no idea what gymnastics was about. She was just running and jumping around, doing drills that her coach wanted her to. That’s when Soma’s husband Bisweswar noticed her and thought she had potential.”
A few years later, Dulal had to take another big decision for his daughter. The plan was always for Dipa to follow her elder sister’s footsteps and join an English medium school after kindergarten. But joining an English medium school meant ending gymnastics practice. Dipa was showing a lot of promise, but it was impossible to predict where she would end up in the sport. It was an impossible decision.
Years later, Dulal would receive the phone call that would vindicate his decision to choose gymnastics beyond doubt.
“It was around midnight and I was growing restless. Then her elder sister Puja called up and said Dipa had called her. I asked her to ask Dipa to call me,” Dulal remembers. When she finally called, Dipa did not have too many words for her father, but she did have the ones he wanted to hear. “I have qualified,” she had said. Dulal could sleep now. His daughter had become the first Indian woman to every qualify for the Olympics.
But did he, when he was taking her to her first coach or enrolling her in a Bengali medium school, ever realise that he was silently contributing to the making of an Olympian, who would come as close to an Olympic medal as PT Usha and Milkha Singh. “Certainly not!” Dulal says. “At that age, you don’t think of these things. When parents in Agartala take their young kids to practice disciplines like gymnastics, they are thinking of it as means to escape poverty, to get a job. Nobody’s thinking of the Olympics.”
Maybe, now they are.
Flat foot?
If there was disbelief on Bisweswar Nandi’s face, it was that of the how-is-this-happening kind. A sports expert had come down from Kolkata, looked at his most promising ward and told him that the girl had flat feet and was better doing something else. “He told me that she had flat feet,” Nandi would remember years later. “She would never be able to make it in gymnastics, he said, and advised me to change her discipline. But I said no. I could see how interested she was in gymnastics.”
Greatness, it is said, is built on faith. Nobody has contributed as much to Dipa’s career as Nandi has. The coach has been with her for every moment, every tournament, tweaking her technique, offering her words of encouragement, consolation and rebuke, hiding her mobile when he felt it needed to be hid, deciding what she ate. But nothing he ever did or will do in the future, will match up to that little bit of faith he placed in a seven-year-old girl who was up against it.
His reward would come years later when the Dronacharya award was conferred on him for guiding Dipa to the Olympics. “It feels great,” he said on the day he heard the news. “It is a proud moment for her as well, me winning this at the same time as she is winning the highest sporting honour in the country.”
Poetic justice, indeed. After all, where would Arjuna have been without Dronacharya?
vishnu.prasad@newindianexpress.com