Venugopal Chandrasekhar

Venugopal Chandrasekhar is a former National table tennis champion and Arjuna Award winner from Tamil Nadu, India.

National Champion

He was exceptionally good player of table tennis and was National Champion.

Among his major achievements are winning the Nationals, making the semi-final of the Commonwealth championships in 1982, and helping India progress to category I from II in the 1983 Tokyo World Championships.

Early days

At the age of 12, Chandrashekhar played well known The Madras Port Trust tournament. He joined the Emesor sport's council and it helped him to improve his game. The training regimen included Yoga and prayers, apart from table tennis. Chandra became the Tamil Nadu state sub junior champion in 1970. In 1973 he became Tamil Nadu's junior champion and also entered the National quarter finals. Chandra's style was flamboyant and at a time when sports coverage on TV was very limited, tickets for his matches sold in black in towns that traditionally patronized table tennis like Indore and Pune. Later he won National Championship.

Tragedy : Negligence at hospital

Chandra was twenty-five. He had some pain in knee and the world crumbled for this National Champion, when the minor knee operation[1] in September 1984 at a renowned hospital went wrong. He was already the national champ and was making his mark on the international TT scene when he had to go in for knee surgery in Chennai Apollo hospital.[2] But things went wrong on the operation table, wrong dosage of anesthesia played its part and Chandra suffered brain damage and he lost his vision and control over his limbs.[1] He spent 36 days in a near-coma state and eighty-one days in the hospital as part of 'rehab'. The treatment abroad was funded mainly from responses to a public appeal by Chandra for funds. Members of the public, sportsmen from India and abroad, politicians and actors helped generously.[1] The treatment abroad improved Chandra's condition a bit.

Lawsuit

A lawsuit was filed in 1985 against the hospital and it was three years before it came to trial. The medical community's omertà was broken by a few brave doctors, especially an anesthetist from Maharashtra helped to demolish the hospital's case. During the trial it came to light that the orthopedic surgeon of the hospital had received training at arthroscopy only in workshops at UK and not in a medical school as part of the curriculum. Eight years after the operation, five years since the trail began, after examination of ten witnesses, after recording a thousand pages of evidence, the court delivered a verdict in favour of Chandra in mid-May 1993. The judgement pronounced that, "The plaintiff is entitled to in total, Rs 17,37,920.78 by way of special damages and general damages." A medico legal case of this proportion was unheard of in India. A young patient had sued a hospital for negligence and had won nearly twenty lakhs. Even the cynics of the Indian Judiciary were impressed. The hospital appealed against the decision, but ultimately settled after two years. During the trail years Chandra continued his treatment in India and abroad and worked at a State Bank of India[3] to support himself. He was a gold medalist of Madras University(Economics) was to work as a cashier. A fight which he feels would not have been necessary had "human spirit prevailed over ego". After a prolonged struggle he triumphed.

Recovery

Chandrasekhar has made a good recovery physically. He has regained 70% of his vision, though reading small letters on the computer and driving at night are still a problem. Chandra was extremely popular with the crowd during his playing days through the sheer power of his personality and of course talent.

Chandrasekhar was one of the sports professionals in India to ask for appearance money and also actively sought to improve player's working conditions. Chandrasekhar wrote a column on table tennis, 'TopSpin', for 'The Telegraph' and also covered tournaments for newspapers after his operation. From a person equipped with razor sharp reflexes needed to play a game in which the ball typically travels at 100 km/h or more, Chandraselhar today is a person who does not have normal peripheral vision and cannot see beyond a few feet; he suffers from a condition called nystagmus - his eyeballs cannot focus. A bulb, for instance, appears as a series of points of light. Chandra runs an academy for young table tennis players and is married to Mala; they have a son, Sanjay.

Autobiography

Chandrashekhar penned down, with the help of Seetha Srikanth, his painful struggle in his autobiography My fightback from Death's door which is published by Eastwest books, Chennai during 2006.[3]

There are times when I stumble on the footpath, and people have thought that I was drunk.

That is when it hurts for it is not my fault. Then I look at the computer in my office and cannot read the small letters. To be lesser than a normal human being is what pains me the most. But I know I have to carry on. - V. Chandrasekhar.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Wadehra, Randeep (3 December 2006). "Facing Life like a Champ". The Sunday Tribune. Retrieved 21 September 2012.
  2. ↑ Aurora, Bhavna Vij (3 July 2006). "Anatomy of a Coverup". Outlook India. Retrieved 21 September 2012.
  3. 1 2 Chandrashekhar, V. "My fightback from Death's door". East West Books, Chennai. Retrieved 21 September 2012.

External links

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