Yash Gaonkar is only 12 years old and the pilot for the Krishna Worli Police Camp Mandal. In other words, the little guy chosen to break the handi. A student of Sacred Heart School in Worli, (central Mumbai) Yash looks frail and totally anaemic but that is only how he looks, say his team mates, all big burly boys and pot-bellied, middle-aged men.
Yash has been chosen because he is light and agile. He has been practising for today since June, though he has been the group’s navigator for a couple of years. After school and in between and after tuitions, Yash has been spending hours on an open ground at Worli Police Camp with his group – climbing up the pyramid and falling down at least thirty times a day.
“No I do not get hurt. It is all in the mind,” the little fella says. His team mates add that Yash has been trained in ‘mind control’ and ‘balance’ which makes him better than most other small boys who do the same job.
One look at Yash and his face tells the whole story. Not nervous but his face detached from the excitement and carousing that his team mates have been indulging in the whole day. An older team member whispers to me, “that is called mind control, if he keeps dancing and prancing everywhere, he will lose focus.” (The only time he smiled was for the camera).
Yash have been practicing on various surfaces to balance deftly. He has also been learning to ‘concentrate on the task assigned to him and free his mind from other qualms.’ On the job, Yash wears headgear and a jacket as precaution.
Yash is a picture of perfect peace just before a climb. He stares at the pot above and then studies his team mates’ moves. As soon as the pyramid is almost complete, he starts his mount but not once getting distracted by the crowds that shout out his name and edge him on.
Yash is swift, the three handis that PaGaLGuY watched him attempt, and he was up there in seconds. He resembled Batman, (a rather delicate Batman) as he latched on to the legs and shoulders of his mates and climbed up. No, he did not break any but that is because they were at least 5-6 feet above him. On realising he was unable to achieve his goal; he would look down at his senior team members and when given the cue, speedily come down.
Yash is not afraid of falling down, that fear he let go a long time ago. That he is not able to break handis is also not a worry anymore. “I have conditioned my mind to give it my best and not let anything else distract me,” he says. Yash is mentally far stronger than boys of his age. Hopefully all the mind control games and lessons in balance will help him through his studies and life.