Surfing swami by Gopal MS.
The word surf seems to be derived from the word suffe, a reference to the coastline of India, but the sport isn’t very popular there. Despite having 7,500 km of coastline, India is not known for beaches, let alone for surfing. Slowly, however, it seems that a surf culture is emerging mixed in parts with Hindu spirituality.
More generally, they had an Indian Surf Festival in Puri this month, which is where the photo above is from. Honestly, the beach looks rather tame and I couldn’t see much actual surfing, but it’s a start.
More specifically, there’s a long-standing Ashram Surf Retreat which combines vegetarianism, meditation, yoga and surfing. It sounds very interesting:
“There’s one thing about surfing,” Daruka says later. “It forces you to stay in the present moment. If you turn your back to Mother Ocean for even a second, she’ll definitely give you a wake-up call.” (The Surfing Swamis)
That said, Sri Lanka still has better beaches and surfing, as people saw during the Arugam Bay Pro Contest (video gets into surfing about three minute in). Since Sri Lanka is an island, there’s great at any given season somewhere on the island and, nevermind. It’s nice to see that India’s surfing culture is moving along.
How blessed we have been with nature’s bounty compared to India. Even the earth dug out for building a road in Kataragama recently turns out to be full of precious stones. I think they auctioned off the ore yesterday.
I think it’s partly to do with the fact that Indians haven’t been as seafaring a nation as one would expect. Maybe the land provided all their needs; maybe it’s to do with the belief that crossing the sea would make them lose their caste.