Chennai: The Olympic Recreation Club, or ORC, is easy to miss. Its one narrow doorway, situated in a perpetually frantic side alley of T Nagar in Chennai, is cut into the same building as a tea shop. Only a tiny blue board bears, in Tamil and English, the club’s name. Upstairs, seedy rooms lead off slim corridors, all watched over by two old men in two old chairs.
Game on: The Olympic Recreation Club draws youngsters mostly from the poorer sections of society.
But, out of such humble beginnings, sometimes, can world champions be born.
In the international sport of carrom, there have been five male and five female world champions—and, in a feat of domination that is usually expected from China in table tennis, all 10 have been Indian. Seven of the 10 have been from Tamil Nadu.
Five of those seven count ORC as their carrom home, the place where they were tutored in the game, or where they honed their finger-flicks over thousands of hours of practice.
“Really, if you look at any of the top carrom players in India, somehow they are linked to this club,” says B. Bangaru Babu, executive president of the Tamil Nadu Carrom Association. “Even Swiss and Fre-nch carrom players have landed in Chennai and come here to practise, just because th-ey’ve heard so much about it.”
More nations play international carrom than Test cricket: 17, including countries such as Australia, Japan, the US, South Korea and Germany. But no country took the sport to heart as India did.
Once, almost every middle-class home had a carrom board tucked away behind a door or on top of a wardrobe. These evenings, though, are passed before soaps, video-games and the Internet. The carrom board remains hidden.
But, Bangaru Babu insists that the love for carrom is still alive, even if it has stepped from one demographic to another. There are many poor children passionate about the sport, he says, but they need support and guidance if India is to keep producing world champions.
In 1969, a benevolent Malayalee named K.K. Sivadasan started ORC to encourage indoor games such as carrom, chess and table tennis, simply because space for outdoor sports was at a premium. The club now has 942 members, who pay Rs1,200 every two years as fees.
To make its rent of Rs30,000 every month, ORC also charges card players a fee to lease two rooms of circular, velvet-covered tables for card games every evening. “But, no gambling, though. Make sure you mention that,” says K. Govindan, who has been secretary of ORC since 1975, which was also when he first met Bangaru Babu.
To say Bangaru Babu is synonymous with carrom is to mean it, in this case, literally. He is known in the sport’s circles as Carrom Babu, and his house is named Carrom Villa. He started, over the course of a long career, the All India Carrom Federation (in 1956), the International Carrom Federat-ion (1988), and the Asian Carr-om Confederation (1995). La-mely, but nonetheless earnestly, Govindan says: “They shou-ld rename the sport ‘Babu’.”