I read the story of Dharam Veer today and felt it is one I should share. It spells out to me how wonderful sport can be, and even more so, how wonderful India and its people can be.
Dharam is ballboy for the Indian cricket team. He helps them at training, chasing balls around, and throwing them back “with one of the finest throwing arms to bless a man”. He is friends with many of the team, and travels around with them when they are playing.
About his job with the team, he says:
”This makes me very happy.
”I have this life now, and this is what I will do forever. I love cricket, I have always loved it, I want to play and practise all the time, help the team, I cannot do anything other than this. It is what I am supposed to do.”
What is truly remarkable about Dharam is that he contracted polio at 18 months old, and the disease left him immobile from the waist down. For the past 16 years he has used the hands and arms, that he uses to catch the balls and throw them, to walk on. On concrete, mud, grass, buses, rickshaws, he places one hand over the other to make his way in the world, dragging behind him the deformed legs that refuse to walk.
At 19, Dharam is living a relative high life. As a bona fide member of the Indian side he travels and stays with them, is helped financially by the players, and has developed quite a following. He is also captain of India’s disabled cricket team. Through sheer enthusiasm for cricket, he has managed to weave himself into one of the most tightly protected sports teams in the world. He is no longer an outsider, either, and the players treat him like family. It could be so different for him, as India has numerous polio victims who struggle through life and are often wondering where their next meal is coming from.
Dharam has played cricket since he can remember, and can tell you the story of his highest score for India all day long. ”I made 175,” he says. He sat on a chair and dispatched bowling to all corners, much like his heroes Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag.
Such is his dedication, that he made a 36 hour-trip from his home town of Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh to Bangalore for the second Test, on buses and tuk-tuks. He says:
”I miss my family, but I always call my mother, father, sister, talk to them at night,”
”This makes me very happy.
I contrast his spirit and determination with some of the complaining that went on over the Commonwealth Games in Delhi recently – like the athletes’ village not being clean enough, toilets being blocked, the little organisational glitches that were happening. At the time I was thinking “get over it precious, this is India”. India is a wonderful, if chaotic, country, and there are countless examples of people like Dharam Veer who do carve out their own slice of the “good life” in the face of whatever adversity they run into on the way to it.
