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Proud little town gives Indian
Hockey two captains at same time, both Sikhs
WSN Bureau
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Sandeep
Singh |
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This sleepy little hamlet along the Delhi-Amritsar highway in
Haryana has made the Sikh community proud, and doubly so. When
India
announced the Captain of its men’s hockey team, Shahbad Markanda
celebrated, cheering for Sandeep Singh.
If the cheers were louder than usual, there was good reason.
India’s women hockey team is also led by a Sikh girl,
Surinder Kaur, again from Shahbad Markanda! She has been retained as
Captain once again. And make that three cheers please.
The man who coached both of them is Baldev Singh, a proud
Sikh. Both Surinder Kaur and Sandeep Singh have faced remarkable
odds in their journey to this spot in the sunlight.
On
August 22, 2006, Sandeep was traveling to Delhi by the Shatabdi
Express, en route to joining his teammates ahead of the World Cup in
Germany , when the gun of an RPF jawan went off accidentally and
caught the drag flicker in the hip.
There was talk of
paralysis while most experts wrote off his hockey career. But perhaps hockey was his life and he never wanted to let
go. Whether doctors cured him or his determination to win the
turfwar of life, Sandeep emerged from the hospital with a hockey
stick in hand.
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Surinder Kaur |
Again, when Surinder first put on an
India jersey a
decade ago, her father, a daily wage labourer on a farm, couldn’t
afford to buy her a hockey stick. A couple of months ago, she helped
her family buy a new house. Today, her father does his own farming.
“My family went through terrible times, but we survived, because of
hockey,” said Surinder.
On the shoulders of Sandeep and Surinder rests the fate of
Indian Hockey now, a game which has been pushed over the ledge by
the shenanigans of men like KPS Gill and the unprofessional approach
of Indian Hockey Federation.
14 January 2009
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