Navi Mumbai-based Shubham Vammali (18) recently dived into the elite league of long distance swimmers worldwide. He completed two of the most difficult endurance swimathons of the high seas by swimming the English Channel and the Strait of Gibraltar.
This young ‘merman’ made his debut in the international long distance swimmers league last August, when he swam the English Channel — a distance of 40 km — in 12 hours 42 minutes. A mere ten days later, he dived into the choppy waters of the Strait of Gibraltar, traversing the distance of 32 km in 3 hours 16 minutes, setting a new record for Asian origin swimmers.
Born into a household of sports enthusiasts — father Dhananjay is a former volleyball player and incumbent secretary of Navi Mumbai Volleyball Amateur Association; mother Deepika is a former kabaddi player, and younger sister Siddhi, an amateur swimmer — this first year business management undergrad of Mumbai’s Sterling College attributes his early entry into the international league to parental support and the rigorous training regimen he has undertaken during the past ten years since he took to aqua sports. “My parents have always been pillars of strength and encouraged me to switch from competitive pool swimming to open water sports in 2009,” he acknowledges.
Since the time he made his first splash in competitive aquatics at age eight, Shubham — a dyslexic from birth — has won over 200 medals in state and national level championships apart from the All India Open Water Navy Sea Swimming event. “Although academics has been tough going because of my dyslexia, the support and encouragement I’ve received from my school (Ryan International School, Kharghar) management and teachers, enabled me to complete my school education and simultaneously train for aquatic tournaments,” says Shubham.
But success on the high seas hasn’t been smooth sailing. Shubham follows a relentless training regimen of five-six hours in the pool at the Father Agnel Sports Centre, Vashi, supplemented by fitness sessions in the gym and on the athletics track under the guidance of national coach Gokul Kamath.
Meanwhile ever on the lookout for new seas to conquer, Shubham has his sights on two testing open water stretches — the Catalina Channel (34 km) and the Manhattan Marathon Swim (40 km) — in the US next year.
Bon voyage!
Shweta Nair (Mumbai)
Taha Memon
‘I walk ahead, seeing nothing, but nothingness... dense fog’ is the sum and substance of a haiku — a Japanese form of poetry which expresses maximum emotion in minimum words — which bagged Vadodara-based Taha Memon (17) the Katha Grand Prize for creative writing in the senior category (class VIII-XII) of the National Bal Katha Utsav 2014, staged in New Delhi last December. Taha’s haiku bested 28 creative writing entries submitted for the Katha Grand Prize.
Introduced to the nuances of creative writing by his English language teachers in his early years, this class XII student of the city’s CBSE-affiliated Anand Vidya Vihar School cleared the preliminary round of the competition last October, by impressing a highly qualified jury panel with his short story The Madman.
The elder of two children of Zuber, a Vadodara-based industrialist, and mother Firdaus, a homemaker — both compulsive readers — Taha acknowledges his parents and family as formative influences. Surrounded by the works of poets William Wordsworth, John Keats, Pablo Neruda, and Lord Byron among others since his early years, Taha began penning verses when he was eight. His grandfather, a voracious reader himself, was instrumental in helping Taha publish his first collection of 20 poems when he was in class IX.
According to Taha, whose 12 awards in story-writing, debates, elocution, Model United Nations, quiz and International English Olympiad crowd the home mantelpiece, the latest award is of special significance because he is now in his final year of school.
“Though long form writing is my forte, my entry of a haiku was to prove a point to myself and my critics who accused me of verbosity,” says this versatile English language aficionado.
Also a keen student of new ICT (information communication technology), Taha is intent upon exploring the possibility of combining an engineering degree programme with journalism after leaving school. With the emergence of new genre liberal arts and sciences institutions offering a wide range of electives and combinations, Taha’s ambition is set to be realised.
Way to go, Bro!
Suverchala Kashyap (Vadodara)