Dharani Selvakumar once snuck into a boat to follow his father to sea. “He’d warned me to keep off the water at any cost,” says the 27-year-old surfer from Kovalam. The instant he saw his son, A Selvakumar, dragged him back home and whacked him. A fisherman, he knew the dangers and uncertainties of the profession, and wanted his only son to grow up far from the whiff of the sea. But the sea runs in Dharani’s blood. Nothing — not even his Computer Engineering degree — could keep him from it. Today, the seven-time National champion and ISA-certified surfing instructor, is in charge of Covelong Point @ Mahabs, the second branch of Covelong Point Surf School.

Dharani was an over-protected 90s kid. Despite his father’s repeated warnings, he did what any kid who lived by a beautiful seaside village would do. He jumped into the water the moment he came back from school and college, spent many afternoons catching crab with his bare hands, and surfing with broken windows and polystyrene boards. And when the surfing culture caught on in Kovalam, Dharani promptly followed suit, borrowing a cousin’s surf board.

“I had a three-month break before I joined Engineering,” he remembers. It was an unforgettable three months. Dharani spent every day hitting the water with the board, conversing with the waves, negotiating the ebbs and falls, falling and rising, until he mastered the art of surfing all by himself. “I was addicted to it,” he says. “But I fell out with my cousin and had to return his board,” he says.

Dharani approached Moorthy Megavan, co-founder of Covelong Point Surf School, who let him use his boards. Soon, Dharani started participating in surfing tournaments.

“The Summer Swell Challenge of 2012 in Puducherry, was the first competition I participated in,” he says. He came first in the semi-finals. In 2013, Dharani came first in the Junior Level at a tournament in Covelong. More successes followed, and Dharani travelled to surfing tournaments in various places, including Vizag, Kovalam (Kerala), Mangalore, and Konark Beach. “I also travelled to Thailand with the sponsorship of Arun Vasu of TT Group, who’s been a big support,” he says. Somewhere along the way, he learned stand up paddling too.

Dharani started teaching at Covelong Point in his free time and enjoyed the process. He’s trained over 6,000 people so far, some of whom are equipped enough to participate in tournaments. The best thing about teaching, for Dharani, is that he gets to see the same unabashed thrill in his students that he experiences every time he rides the waves. “I cannot describe the feeling, but I’m able to share it with someone else, which makes me happy,” he says. Dharani says that he would love to start his own surf school in the future. “But for now, I want to focus on taking the sport to the next level, and involve more boys from Mamallapuram in it,” he adds.

It was not easy making a career out of the very means his father advised against. “People in my village kept badgering him about why I was whiling away my time at sea despite being well educated,” he says. But Dharani’s mother Desam stood by him. She did housekeeping where he taught just to be with him. Gradually, Dharani’s father began to see how much happiness the sea brought his son. On an average day, there may be many people on the beach, admiring Dharani’s moves on the surf board. But he knows that sometimes, his father does too, pausing on his way to work.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Society / by Akila Kannadasa / February 27th, 2019