poverty and had started playing merely to support the family. While a majority of them don’t speak the same language as each other, most don’t understand English forget foreign accents either, although their coach is an Australian.
Just a week before they took on defending Olympic Gold Medallists Great Britain, the Humans of Bombay page shared the inspiring journey of the team’s captain Rani Rampal, as she revealed how the sport was an escape from her life overwhelmed with poverty and hardship. Her father was a cart puller and her mother was a maid. “I wanted an escape from my life; from the electricity shortages to the mosquitoes buzzing in our ear, from barely having two meals to seeing our home getting flooded,” she said, adding that there was only so much her parents could do.
During her childhood, Rampal spent hours watching hockey matches at a nearby academy, which developed in her an interest in the game. However, when she asked the coach to teach her, she was told that she wasn’t strong enough to pull through a practice sessions. So she began practicing with a broken hockey stick, dressed in a salwar kameez, a traditional combination dress worn by women in South and Central Asia. Given the traditional culture she grew up in, Rampal’s family was not…
