I visited my friend Maneesh at his town called Loonkaransar. It’s a typical small town that shuts down by 8:30pm and almost everyone knows everyone. They had built a small park near their house. The place was a barren land and they had planted a bunch of trees around it about 4-5 years ago. Now it’s a flourishing park. It’s named Vivekananda park.
The park has a small badminton court, a walking track and some swings for kids to play. Kids around the area really love the park and are seen playing in it through the day. From kids who have just learnt to walk, to college goers to uncles, all come to the park to just walk around or play badminton.
A badminton competition was arranged and it was open for both kids and adults. It was amazing to see kids as young as 5 years play badminton. They have no trainers there and they have started playing just about a month ago with some guidance from adults. Yet they played quite well. I wonder if they knew numbers and counting. But they knew how to keep badminton scores. This proves that it’s time to rethink our educational system. 🙂
For this badminton competition I was called in as the chief guest. I did the honours of choosing the players and their partners in a random draw, distributing the prizes to the winners etc. I also gave a talk in Hindi at the end of it. It was fun.
Maneesh’s dad Mr. Tara Chand Bhunwal is a super energetic man. He was feeding in energy to the competition. Be it playing, talking to the kids, teenagers, adults or elders, arranging things. He was doing it with ease and was having the entire place in a casual control.
It was n not a small competition. We had more 25 people participating with proper quarter finals, semi finals and finals for singles and doubles. It started at 8:30 am and went on till 2:00 in the afternoon. The winners had trophies distributed to them.
The event was covered in a local news paper too. First time as a chief guest at a badminton competition. A checkbox that didn’t even exist got ticked.
Endless thoughts 