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Journalism of Courage
Nothing about Surat screams ‘sport’.
Around the railway station, one can overhear people talking about bulls and bears, minutes before stock markets open. As one drives further into the city, past the textile mills and the bazaars full of sparkling diamond shops, two young men in this city of dhandho and diamonds have been obsessing over gold. And they will get their first shot at it later this month in Paris.
Surat, a city with practically zero Olympic sports history and negligible infrastructure, will now boast of two Olympians — table tennis players Harmeet Desai, 31, and Manav Thakkar, 24. While Harmeet will compete in the singles event, Manav and he will be part of the team event at the competition.
Though both are from Surat, their road to Paris couldn’t have been more different.
When Harmeet took up table tennis at six years of age, Surat didn’t have any sporting clubs and the only TT table was at St Xavier’s School, near his house.
Luckily for him, his father Rajul loved the game, which he had played at the university level. Harmeet was introduced to TT by his father. “There was a British club where I grew up. When it was closing down, my father managed to get one TT table from there. That’s how I fell in love with the sport. Harmeet’s love for TT has come through me,” Rajul says.
Harmeet’s story begins at his old family home, a massive three-storey blue bungalow that is now a primary school run by his mother Archana. It also doubles up as a TT academy run by his older brother Hraday.
Harmeet was around six when one of Rajul’s friends wanted to give away a TT table. Rajul, then a partner in a stockbroking firm, thought it was a wonderful opportunity to reignite his passion for the sport. Since space wasn’t an issue at his house, he assembled the table on the ground floor, opposite a 12-foot waterfall.
Harmeet’s love affair with the game blossomed in this very room, where he spent countless hours with his father and brother — at times even his mother — playing table tennis. Today, the room has been converted into a “museum” of sorts, with Harmeet’s medals, trophies and tournament accreditation cards.
His first coach Shabbir Bengali says Harmeet’s craze for TT grew with every positive result. “No one played TT professionally then and there were no coaches as such. I trained children at a school and in societies but there was nobody as dedicated to the sport as Harmeet. As he started winning at the city- and state-level, his craze kept growing,” Bengali said.
Seeing Harmeet practice for hours, his mother thought his craze was “just a phase”. She only realised that it wasn’t a craze when Harmeet, then eight, travelled to Ajmer for trials at the Petroleum Sports Promotion Board (PSPB) Academy with his father. His mother was shocked when his father returned alone. Having been selected, Harmeet had chosen to stay back.
The year he spent at the academy changed Harmeet forever. In hindsight, he says, it changed him for the better. “I went to a couple of national ranking tournaments and won a title in the under-10 category but I missed home and decided to come back,” he says.
The immediate problem he faced was the level of competition in Surat. His brother, who he struggled to beat earlier, was no longer his competition. There was nobody he could spar with that was better than him. This meant he had to travel to other TT hubs in the country in search of quality partners and facilities. “I must have practised at every major training facility in India,” he says.
His parents spared no expense. Besides getting him dozens of bats, balls and other equipment — none of them cheap — they would also hire coaches from other cities to train him in Surat, at times paying Rs 2,000 per day, excluding travel.
After cementing his place in the Indian team in the past decades, Harmeet, following in 10-time national champion Sharath Kamal’s footsteps, went for training stints in Germany. He was instrumental in India’s historic team championship bronze at the 2018 Asian Games and gold medals at the Commonwealth Games.
While Harmeet was concentrating on winning city and national titles, unbeknownst to him, he was inspiring an entire generation of players from Surat. Manav being one of them.
“When I was playing at city and state meets, everyone would talk about Harmeet and how he was winning national titles. I wanted to play like him,” says Manav, who is ranked among the top-60 in the world.
His TT journey is quite interesting too. As a child, he would roller skate, play cricket and TT. While he did well in cricket and was a talented skater, he kept losing in TT. And when his parents asked him to pick one of the three sports, he chose TT just because he kept losing. What Manav didn’t know then was that his coach Vaheed Malubhai was making him play against state champions in his academy, which had just one table.
Like Harmeet, Manav too went to the Ajmer academy. Only Manav was 12, old enough to adapt to the conditions better. The academy proved to be a game-changer for him too. Since 2013, he has represented India in various age groups.
Manav is now seen as the heir of men’s table tennis in India, after the trio of Sharath, G Sathiyan and Harmeet move on.
“The basics remain the same, but at the highest level, you have to keep changing your game so the opponent doesn’t know which side of you is going to show up,” Manav tells The Indian Express at his new apartment overlooking the Tapi.
When Harmeet started playing almost 24 years ago, there wasn’t a single academy in Surat. Now, there are over 20 quality academies and more than 30 centres for TT coaching. Competition in the sport has become so robust that Surat is expected to do well in state-level competitions. While Ahmedabad or Baroda dominated the field earlier, Surat is now ready to take it to a higher level.
A new live-in TT academy opened last year on the outskirts of Surat. The Tapti Valley International School is now home to top paddlers from Gujarat. It boasts of all modern facilities — a huge hall with over 12 high-quality tables, a swimming pool, gym and, more importantly, international coaches. Recently, it got the biggest stars too.
Tired of travelling all over the country, both Harmeet and Manav have shifted base to Surat to train at the academy.
“Why go anywhere when we have the best facilities here? Everything is monitored, including our diet,” says Harmeet, who has rented a plush bungalow near the academy, where he lives with his wife Krittwika, a fabulous TT player herself who moved to Surat from Kolkata after their marriage.
Calling the shift a “welcome change”, Manav says he never really spent much time at home since he joined the Ajmer academy. “It’s good to be back home. I love spending time with my family. It relaxes me. It’s not like we’re compromising on quality either,” he says.
Despite the stark improvement in facilities, Surat still has a long way to go in TT. There’s still a lack of knowledge about the sport. “People know me, but they think I play ‘tennis’ or something,” says Harmeet.
Both Harmeet and Manav, the two gems from the city of diamonds, know what can change that. It will be that golden medal in Paris.
