Chennai: Sports is a very integral part of everyone’s childhood. Apart from keeping a person physically fit, sports also helps in building team spirit, strategy and inner self.
‘News Today’ spoke to an NGO called Life is a Ball from Adyar which concentrates on providing sports training to the underprivileged students. Akhil Khatri of Life is a Ball spoke about what the organisation does.
Q: Tell us about Life is a Ball.
A: We work in Chennai, Mumbai and Hyderabad as of now. Most government schools don’t have a structure in place to promote sports. This group was started by Vikram Menon, Somdev Devvarman and Arun Karthik. They went to a football event where six public schools had come together. They donated some sports equipment and the happiness in the face of these kids is what got them to start this NGO. We have a lot of volunteers coming in and helping us in many ways.
Q: How do you approach a particular school?
A: We have a Memorandum of Understanding with the Government of Tamilnadu which gives us a list of schools. This helps us to approach public schools. At present we have partnered with 12 schools.
Q: How does the NGO function? Does it gets fund from the government or through donations?
A: We don’t have any funding from the government as such. The NGO is primarily financed by people who are willing to donate for our cause.
Q: So, if someone wants to donate, how do they do?
A: They can just visit our website called www.lifeisaball.in and make donation online. We also have a contest going whereby if someone purchases a calendar from our website then we donate a football to a government school.
Q: Why do you feel sports is so important?
A: Sports is very important for the underprivileged kids as most of them do not have any sources of entertainment. Sports is literally one of the very few ways in which these kids have any fun in their otherwise monotonous lives. Many of these kids also come from poor backgrounds. In such a scenario, sports is a great way to help these people to ease the pains in their lives for at least a few minutes everyday.
Q: what kinds of sports do you focus on and what are your achievements?
A: We train almost all sports, but our majour focus is on the fitness of the students. Recently, the girls team of the LIAB Sholinganallur school went on to win the State level rugby championship.
Akhil Khatri can be reached at 91762 76541.
Article by Viranch Damani