Kho Kho Kho: A 22-year-old’s journey from collecting scrap to stacking medals | Sport-others News

For as long as he can remember, like all other members of his family, Ramji Kashyap spent a huge chunk of his day stacking corrugated cardboard sheets.Instead of the soundless drudgery, the 22-year-old is now stacking up medals and giant winners’ cheques as India’s best contemporary kho kho star.
Growing up in Velapur village in Maharashtra’s Solapur drict, his father, two brothers and ser would set off each day to deal in bhangaar or kabaad (scrap). Ramji, meanwhile, spent his time securing discarded packaging materials and tattered clothes.
As the dull brown mountains of bhangaar around him grew, so did his love for kho kho — a sport he fell in love with after he was admitted to the hamlet’s only English-medium municipal school.
Playing kho kho meant Ramji could take off on sizzling, unfettered sprints, and dive and dodge his way into becoming India’s finest in the sport.
At the ongoing kho kho World Cup in New Delhi, Ramji is a bullet zigzagging out of a Rajinikanth pol, a blur of blue, as he goes about ensuring India don’t cede any dominance in its traditional sport. Though Iran and Nepal threaten to make the match interesting, Ramji says Indian skill trumps the muscle strength of opponents.
The kho kho star, who still hauls stacks of folded crates on his head when he’s back in his village, says not many notice the unseen cast-iron weights that scrap dealers carry to weigh their daily collections. “The work of a bhangaarwala (scrap dealer) is physically arduous. You carry 30-40 kg (of scrap) on the head, walk around with weights to match and, at best, earn Rs 3,000-5,000 at the end of it. It is a tough life, and kho kho was my way out, though I can never leave the family work,” he says.
Except, 90% of the people from whose homes or shops he picks scrap now recognise Ramji as a star player — thanks to the domestic Ultimate Kho Kho league, where he’s been named the best player for the last two years and gets Rs 5 lakh as a top-tier player for an entire season.
He says his parents were “extremely reluctant” to allow him time off to train for the sport earlier. “It was one pair of hands less to help them pick scrap. They were dead against it, but my siblings supported me,” Ramji recalls.
Dress migration drove the Kashyap family from a village near Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh to eastern Maharashtra in the 1990s. Instead of a permanent abode in Maharashtra, the family called a thatched roof propped up on bamboo stilts home for years. Then, they arrived in Velapur, where Ramji was admitted to the local school. Despite falling in love with kho kho here, his life still revolved around lifeless cardboard.
Velapur, best known for its intricately carved black stone temples, is the last pit stop before the end of the annual Pandharpur waari (yatra on foot). Once a year, tired pilgrims rest in the village grounds. It was in these usually empty grounds that the son of the scrap collectors spent hours perfecting kho kho — a village tradition that sees nearly 200 people practice everyday.
While the ground has a makeshift 400-metre track, senior player Rahul Savant brought bright neon cones to the village from the big city. After that, Rahul and Ramji went about honing their skills during practice.
Spotted at a senior nationals’ event and fast-tracked within Maharashtra, Ramji was picked the Chennai Quick Guns franchise. Overnight, he became a kho kho sensation for millions due to his defensive dashes.
“He always had the physicality, the body language and the speed for this game,” says coach Somanath Bansode, adding that he was left impressed Ramji’s relentlessness to improve his stamina and consency in a quiet sport.
At the World Cup, Ramji draws wondrous gasps over his back dodges, sky dives (forward leaps), pole dives (at the edge) and checks. While he’s speeding full throttle one moment, he brakes suddenly the next.
Playing kho kho on the mat puts added strain on the calves and hamstrings, and ups the risk of ligament tears if you aren’t accustomed to it. Velapur does not have any mats.
“We train him specially before mat tournaments, where running is never as free-flowing as on the mud, on which he runs with elastic limbs. On the mat, running has to be stiff or the ankle is gone,” the coach explains.
An ankle tear put Ramji out of action for close to a year. During that time, the whole village helped feed him and did rehab along with him. This, even as Ramji defied his parents’ insence on quitting the sport and returning to stacking cardboards, because their daily income hinged on it.
Before he found niche stardom, there were times when he had no money to buy shoes. The team would pool in money for him at such times.
“Collecting bhangaar is not the sort of extreme poverty people understand. He also lived on the village periphery, farther from the ground than others. When scouts saw him dodge and dive, they were floored and couldn’t imagine his other life,” coach Bansode says.
Ask Ramji how he flings himself during the sky dives and back dodges, and he says, “I’m not scared because I train to fall without getting hurt.”
This very quality has helped him land a job with Central Railway in Mumbai. And for putting the accent of “ultimate/extreme” in the sport visually, Ramji has landed the nickname ‘Rambo’.
“He will dodge, he will dive, but nobody can catch him,” the coach says of the elusive elastico human form that’s lighting up the World Cup.

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