Football Madness in Udaipur??

During my first visit to India, my best friend and I visited the Rajasthan city, Udaipur, and planned on staying for just a few days. After 3 incredible days of taking in the beautiful lake, eating delicious Rajasthani cuisine, hanging out with locals and spending afternoons lounging on the city’s many sun soaked rooftops, we decided to cancel our bus tickets to Jaisalmer and leave a week later. In the end we had a blast and when our bus was finally leaving the station heading towards our next destination, I promised myself that I would one day return to this magnificent royal desert city.

Now fast forward 6 years and I find myself on an overnight train from Delhi to Udaipur heading to scout the football talent and potential in a mining area just outside of the city. All I could picture was sitting on a rooftop, enjoying a drink and taking in the beautiful scenery of the city I fell in love with many years earlier. This moment didn’t happen till much after my train shoved its way into the station exactly on time at 7:20am.

My colleague, Sweekar, and I were picked up at the station and taken to a nice guest house where we ate breakfast and prepared for the day. We were then driven to the Hindustan Zinc Limited mining area, called Zawar Mines, which was about 1.5 hours outside of Udaipur. The further we drove, the more I was awestruck by the rich beauty of Rajashtani villages. Women with massive nose rings dressed in electric colored saris carrying heavy equipment on their heads, with smiles as big as the vast space that surrounds them.

The continuous array of national geographic like images allowed me to forget about the rooftop and the drink for awhile. We entered the Zawar Mines and had the opportunity to meet many of the wonderful people who work for Hindustan Zinc Limited. They all were excited to share with us the fact that we arrived just on time to watch the opening ceremonies of the of the MKM football tournament. Hindustan Zinc Limited has been hosting this amateur tournament as a CSR project for the past 37 years and, from what we were told, it has become a favorite event for the locals.

I thought it was great that they had a tournament, but I had my doubts about the stadium quality and the crowd. Boy was I wrong. The stadium and pitch was as good as many of the venues I’ve seen around India and the crowd full of the type of passion one would find in Bengal or Goa. 2,000 people, men, women, children packed the stands to watch Gujarat Police (Ahmedabad) play Ludhiana in an uneven match where the men from Gujarat dominated the young Punjabis with a series of hard tackles and fantastic goals.

Maybe it was entertainment, curiosity, boredom or a combination of all 3, but the villagers were just so happy to be out enjoying the football match. And we were told that the crowd will increase over the course of the tournament with an estimated 40,000 attendees visiting the stadium during the week. Even better was that many young boys were playing football just outside of the stadium showing that the tournament was leading some villagers to actually take on the game themselves.

We spent the rest of the day exploring ways we can grow the sport in Rajasthan and were then finally driven back to our guest house, however this time even the electric colored saris couldn’t keep my eyes open. After a quick shower, we hit the town and I did, in fact, get my much awaited drink and view of the lake on one of the many Udaipur rooftops.