Bonding with star athletes in Jamshedpur

Down the memory lanes of Telco township

Norris Pritam

A few months before I joined Telco, India had won four gold medals at the Tehran Asian Games in 1974. They were all in athletics. Barring Sriram Singh (800m) and Shivnath Singh (5,000m), the other two gold medalists, decathlon star V S Chauhan and long jumper T C Yohannan, were in Telco. Bahadur Singh, Jagraj Singh and Suresh Babu, medal winners in Tehran, also belonged to Telco! So, I was naturally excited to be in this exalted company. My fears were proved pointless when coach Suresh Gujarati introduced me to them. To my pleasant surprise, these stalwarts were extremely friendly and never gave the impression of being superstars of Indian athletics.

Shifting to a new city, one always has apprehensions. And I also reached Jamshedpur with a lot of unknown fears. Coming from Delhi, Jamshedpur in Bihar (it was in Bihar State then) was a completely different ball game, at least in my imagination. Will the new city accept me, will language pose a challenge, how will my new colleagues behave? These were the questions I had been contemplating as soon as I got the job offer. Let me confess, amid these apprehensions, I was also excited with the thought of meeting some of the top stars of Indian athletics already employed at Telco.

I must say I was in secular company! Chauhan spent his formative years between Bhind Morena in Madhya Pradesh and Lucknow, while late Suresh Babu and Yohannan were from Kerala. Bahadur and Jagraj belonged to Punjab. Young pole vaulter Rajender was from Bhiwani in Haryana while his senior, Wasim Naqvi, was from Uttar Pradesh. So I never felt sidelined by anyone. I had a Delhi connection too. 800m runner B D Sharma, long distance runner Dharamveer and quarter miler Harkamaljit Singh were all from Delhi and my old teammates. Om Prakash, a high jumper from Haryana, was my closest buddy and we often used to have joint cooking sessions! Om Prakash had a way with the locals, whether it was the Postman or the Dhaba owner at Kharangajhar; they all loved him. And being with him made my task easier in the new city.

Naqvi Sahab was the senior-most. He was allotted a house in `N’ Type, adjacent to the athletics track where we used to train twice a day. Every evening the little garden in front of Naqvi’s ground-floor house used to be our Adda for evening tea and general chit-chat. He and his wife, Chitra, also a former middle-distance runner, were genial hosts.

Telco then had no gym or indoor fitness centre. I remember how Suresh Babu had removed a ceiling fan from one room and had tied a rope to practise catapulting for jumping events. Yohannan, on the other hand, I saw mostly jogging or doing some light exercises. But at the drop of a hat, he could run 100m in 10.6 sec even as he was a specialist long jumper. In fact, he was the first Indian to cross 8 metres in the long jump as he set the Asian Record of 8.07 to win the gold in Tehran. His record remained intact for 30 years! I don’t recall Telco specialist 100m runner A Aziz ever running with him!

Coach Gujarati told me how he took young Bahadur Singh and Jagraj Singh when they first came to Jamshedpur to the top Telco boss, Sarosh Gandhi, and said “Sir ye do haathi ke bacche laya hun’! (Sir, I have brought two baby elephants). And the two did not disappoint or let down Telco as Bahadur won a silver medal in Tehran and later two successive gold medals in shot put in Bangkok and New Delhi Asian Games. Later, he turned to coaching and for a long time he was also the national coach.

We used to run short cross-country stretches through the forest to the banks of the Swaran Rekha river for sand running. Middle distance stars C Pratap Kumar and Purshottam were always so encouraging fellow-runners.
In the 70s, the Royal Enfield Bullet bike was a big rage. And I don’t think there were many in Telco then. But two such bikes with star riders on them I still remember were Jagraj Singh and V S Chauhan! Jagraj had Bahadur as his permanent pillion rider. And these three gentle giants were always turners when they rode in multicoloured tracksuits!

I wonder if Bullet still fires the imagination of Telco youngsters!

(Norris Pritam is a highly respected and prominent New Delhi-based veteran sports journalist, author, and former long-distance runner. Over a career spanning more than four decades, he has established himself as one of India’s most respected track and field experts, extensively reporting on systemic issues and historic moments in Indian sports)

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