How Mareeswaran Sakthivel made his way from Indian hockey outpost to junior national camp
The 20-year-old from Kovilpatti, a hockey-mad pocket of Tamil Nadu, dreams of breaking into the senior national squad
By Deepti Patwardhan
It wasn’t the deeds of Indian hockey greats, as relayed on television screens, that captured the imagination of one of India’s fastest rising junior stars Mareeswaran Sakthivel. The seeds of his hockey dreams were laid in Kovilpatti, an industrial town in Tamil Nadu situated about 567 kilometers from the state capital Chennai and seemingly a million miles away from Indian hockey’s nerve centre.