Best friends since Class VI, they not only share a similar childhood, but the same passion and now the same dream. Meet 18-year-old Simarpreet Singh and 19-year-old Tariq Ahmad, the two players who will represent the state at the national slum soccer camp in India and if selected, play against 80 countries internationally.
For Tariq, born in a family of five and losing his father when he was very young, childhood was anything but easy. “My mother is a tailor and brought us up with whatever she saved,” says Tariq, who later lived with his grandparents.
“I didn’t study for a while and only after a neighbour told my grandmother, was I sent to school,” adds Tariq. It wasn’t until he left his government school and joined Marica High School that things changed for him.
Tariq’s interest in soccer began in 2011. “I started out by playing normally but I realised my passion for the game when I was picked up by our coach Salih Ahmed. That’s when it became serious,” says the first-year engineering student.
For 18-year-old, Simarpreet, for whom “growing up was difficult as they barely had money to eat or spend”, says the dream started to take shape when he was spotted by the coach while playing near his house. Since both boys play on the same position in the team, as defenders, are they worried about only one of them getting picked? “We’re like brothers so whether he goes or I do, it’s the same. But I know that we will both get selected,” Simarpreet says.
And the two friends have 5 friends to thank for — Adithya Sanjay, Anishay Raj, Sweekrity Goyal, Prashanth R. and Karthik Dantu from — The Awakening Foundation and Kaarmic Education Services, both of which provide better educational opportunities to children from impoverished families
Adithya and Karthik have been classmates since their engineering days at Gurunanak Eng-ineering college, they joined a global internship programme together and that’s where they met Anishay and Prashant, who were friends since their engineering days at MGIT. While Adithya and Karthik founded Awakening Foundation, they joined hands with Anishay and Prashant to start Kaarmic Education Services. Sweekrity was brought in to head the Woman Empowerment Program. “We provide students with customised and personalised employability services right from schooling. We aim to build an employable talent pool coming out of low-income communities,” Adithya says.
With a focus on education, the group wanted to find better ways to help students improve their lives through sports. “We were looking for collaborators and that’s how we found Slum Soccer, a Nagpur-based organisation that promotes football among the low-income youth and also creates employability opportunities for players to become coaches,” he adds.
Through Slum Soccer, they also found out about the National Rajiv Gandhi Slum Soccer Tournament and how there has never been a team from Hyderabad. It was sports enthusiast Karthik who came up with the idea to find the talents among their networks. “He got in touch with Sports Coaching Foundation (an NGO at Masab Tank that provides free coaching to slum kids in various sports), picked a team and trained them for a month. These kids took part in the tournament and reached the finals, which they sadly lost,” Adithya says, explaining how they found Tariq and Simarpreet.
