279 karatekas from 80 schools weigh in at Sonarpura — and the girls got the mat first

The hall at Bengal Inter College in Sonarpura has been busy since Tuesday morning, and the queue at the weighing scale told you how far school karate has travelled in this city. Two hundred and seventy-nine players from eighty schools turned up for the district secondary-school championship — and 150 of them were girls, against 129 boys. Day one belonged entirely to the girls. Bouts ran through the sub-junior, junior and senior age groups in both kata, the solo form, and kumite, the sparring event where points are won and lost in a blink. Event secretary Major Vimal Rao's summary of the day was that the girls simply kicked their way to their wins. Principal Dr Brijesh Mani Pandey opened the meet, and district karate association secretary Dilip Saini ran it with the schools' sports teachers. The boys take over on Wednesday morning, from eight to noon, across the same three age groups — and if you have ever wanted to watch kumite up close, a school hall on a weekday morning is a friendlier place to start than a stadium. A divisional championship, drawing players from Jaunpur, Ghazipur, Chandauli and Varanasi, was held the same afternoon. For a discipline that is often treated as an after-school hobby, an eighty-school turnout is a real number — and a girls' majority on the entry list is the kind of detail worth noticing in Kashi's sports calendar.

Compiled by HelloBanaras from public sources: Amar Ujala — Varanasi