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 district, his father, two brothers and sister 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 pistol, a blur of blue, as …




