A tall order

With only their sense of touch and their understanding of one another to guide them,this group of youngsters has mastered the art of performing rope mallakhamb and pole mallakhamb.

With only their sense of touch and their understanding of one another to guide them,this group of youngsters has mastered the art of performing rope mallakhamb and pole mallakhamb. The performance of these visually challenged youngsters at the Ganesh visarjan procession at Laxmi Road was awe-inspiring. “Being visually challenged doesn’t interfere with their will to learn,perform,practice and spread awareness about mallakhamb,” says their coach Shrinivas Havaldar. And this was proved by the precision with which they performed recently.

During the Ganesh Visarjan this year,we had eight visually challenged girls performing various types of exercises of rope mallakhamb. The idea was to prove that they can accomplish anything they set their minds to and this willpower and skill can also help in popularising the sport, says Havaldar.

Havaldar,who has been training children for the last 12 years,is an accomplished mallakhamb performer and coach. He took it upon himself to teach visually challenged children only two years ago. While the boys have been training under me for around two years,the girls who performed at the visarjan have been learning mallakhamb only for the last six months, he reveals.

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Some of the performances included the stridle,patangi,one-leg ricked,pyramid and other individual performances by the girls on rope mallakhamb. Since they are visually challenged,they have to be taught by making them feel each and every style of mallakhamb individually. Even for their performance during visarjan,the girls practised every step and coordinated the same with the others to ensure that they didnt go wrong anywhere. Priyanka Waghmare,one of the participants,says,”We rigorously practice everyday to get the coordination right. For the pyramid and rope mallakhamb,we had to first individually feel the posture and then coordinate it with others with the help of our teacher. Only with repeated practice were we able to do it ourselves.”

As far as future performances are concerned,Havaldar hopes that these girls and boys will inspire people to take up the sport and also help the government to take notice of and promote it. The exposure that the sport gets during social events like these is huge. We want to put up more such performances in India and abroad so that the sport garners more recognition. In fact,even during the visarjan,we had people enquiring about the sport, he says.

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