Track to celluloid
National 100m hurdles champion G. Gayathry has changed her attention to celluloid — albeit briefly. Gayathry is the heroine of director Balu Manivannan’s Tamil film Aasaipadugiren, which captures the rise of a village girl to the pinnacle of athletics. Gayathry’s coach P. Nagarajan said the film “is all about the challenges a young athlete faces in her career.” “There are no duets and romantic scenes in the film. Siva, the male protagonist of the movie, is also from my athletics academy. A classmate of Gayathry in the film, he helps her achieve her targets on the track.
“The film is almost over. Balu Manivannan, who sought my inputs for scenes related to athletics, has shot it with sensitivity,” he added. On the field, Gayathry is preparing for the November 12-27 Asian Games. She did creditably at the Commonwealth Games by entering the hurdles final.
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P. Naveen Kumar is ecstatic. The No. 1 goalkeeper of India’s junior hockey team has got a brand new kit from New Zealand. In top hockey playing countries, goalkeepers of national teams can claim their kit as a matter of right. But India, as every sports enthusiast knows, is different. This country can burn a huge hole in its pocket by spending `40 crore for an aerostat for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Commonwealth Games and can be indifferent to the needs of its young sportspersons at the same time. Naveen had to struggle a lot to buy the kit. The SRM University student had to make do with a worn-out chest pad, torn thigh pads and a rickety helmet for many months even though he had been playing for India for more than a year. When the plight of the goalkeeper was highlighted in the columns of this newspaper, Hayden Bennet, a hockey enthusiast, took note.
Hayden, who is a good friend of Indian senior team’s goalkeeper Bharat Chetri, approached OBO, a New Zealand-based hockey kit manufacturing company. He sought concession for Naveen. Obo agreed to sell goalkeeping kit worth `1.5 lakh to the young goalkeeper for `45,000. Even that amount was beyond the means of Naveen’s father. It was then the turn of SRM to carry forward Hayden’s good work. The private university readily paid the amount required to ship in the kit from New Zealand. “I have no worries in the world now,” Naveen exclaimed after OBO’s consignment reached his house at St. Thomas Mount.
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