Follow your heart even if it means being an outlier
LEGEND WRITES India’s Winter Olympics icon Shiva Keshavan tells his younger self not to care about sceptics
Dear me LETTER TO MY YOUNGER SELF Dear 15-year-old Shiva,
You will find this hard to believe but when you are in school tomorrow, your life is going to change forever. You remember that winter talent-scouting camp in Panchkula you went to for two weeks? Yes, the one where they made you roll on the streets on a strange sled with wheels. Well, guess what? Now, they want you to try the real thing, teach you how to flit down icy slopes at breakneck speed. In Austria.
In another month, you will be at a small village called Igls. And although you won’t know this while you’re learning how to speed down ramps made of ice, this is your destiny.
I know it’s not exactly a conventional life choice but your family couldn’t care less about convention. Not your mother, an Italian by birth, who travelled to India by road with three friends in the 1970s. And definitely not your father, a Malayali who started a trekking company in Himachal. They urge you to follow your heart.
At your first Olympics in Nagano, almost everyone will do a double take. ‘Indian?’ they will ask. ‘Does it even snow there?’ they will want to know. You will realise you are an outlier.
There are no luge tracks in India. So you make do with what you have. You train on the road with a makeshift sled with roller wheels underneath instead of the steel runners used on ice. You hurtle down winding highways with cars speeding up the opposite direction.
In 20 years, you will never get a dime from your national federation and your first sponsor will come only after hundreds of companies have turned their backs on you.
You will be outspoken and pay a price for it. You won’t be given your Olympians’ badge for three Games. At the 2006 Games, your Olympic participation medal won’t be given to you. You’ll be told that it was stolen from the Games Village. You will finally get it after a two-year long legal battle.
The trick is not to care about the sceptics. How else will you be the torch-bearer for winter sports in India?