On the bowling greens
The Asia-Pacific Championships in 2009 saw this young lady excel in a field that was relatively unknown in India, that is till the Commonwealth Games 2010.
The champion
After spending months of rigorous training abroad, 15-year-old Tania Choudhury, a young national lawn bowl player is back in India and to her school books as well! “My exams are beginning next month. Then I have my selection exams. And I also have to focus on my board examination next year,” says this 10th grader from St. Mary School, Guwahati, Assam who started lawn bowl when she was 12 and won her first medal at an international contest when she was just 14.
The rules of the game
Lawn bowls or lawn bowling is a precision sport in which the goal is to roll asymmetrical balls (called bowls) as close as possible to a small white ball (called the jack/kitty/sweetie). The sport is played outdoors on grass and indoors on artificial surfaces. Sadly, the game doesn’t have the same level of popularity in India as it does abroad so what made Tania take to this sport? Tania agrees, “Not many Indians know about it. But awareness is increasing. I got to know about the game when it was played as part of the National Games three years ago,’’ says this young lady. And is it very strenuous? Tania says it’s not. “An interesting part of lawn bowls is that it does not require much physical labour and is more about concentration.”
Practise makes perfect
Training takes a lot of time and effort. When the championships or other tournaments are on, this teenager tries to devote at least eight hours to lawn bowling practice. Right now, however as she says, “I am spending the same amount of time catching up with tuitions and whatever I might have missed out on in school. Thank God, I have great teachers and friends to help me out,” she sighs with relief.
Varied interests
And what about the envy factor among her classmates? “Well, each one of us has faced that. But now people appreciate the fact that I am doing something good,” says Tania. But lawn-bowling is not the only thing that interests Tania. Not only is she a trained classical singer, but like many her age, she loves football and technology and is a self-professed gadget freak. The moral of the story? If you want to chase a goal, simply roll towards it, concentrating on it all the while — just as Tania did!
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