Kerala

Adding a dash of colour to boat race

PADDLE POWER: Members of the foreign women’s team practising along with the Vembanad Vanitha Boat Club members for the Nehru Trophy Boat Race, on the Punnamada Lake in Alappuzha on Tuesday.

For the third year in a row, the Nehru Trophy Boat Race will have a multi-national flavour with Julie Amer and her team of ‘oarswomen’ from the United Arab Emirates landing here on Tuesday.

Ms. Amer, a British national working in Dubai and founder of the international adventure club, Mountain High, is as usual leading the team, which comprises women from five countries, all of whom are working in Dubai.

Apart from Ms. Amer, Katrina Valente and Suzanne Wade are the two other Britishers in the team.

While Ms. Valente is a holistic therapist, Ms. Wade is a breast cancer survivor and a member of the Tickled Pink paddling team that won the silver medal at the Penang Dragon boat World Championship last year. Malaysian national Kaw Fei Chin is seeing the trip to Kerala as a new experience in her career with the travel industry and is also realising a long-standing dream of visiting Kerala’s backwaters.

For Austrian citizen Marie-Christine Purdon, the boat race is a welcome adventure break from her job of designing mosaics.

One person that stands apart from the group is French national Brigitte Chemla. And that is not because of her French moorings, but because of the fluency with which she speaks Malayalam. Married to a Keralite, Ms. Chemla earlier lived here for 15 years and was looking forward to an adventure trip when the offer to join Ms. Amer’s team came.

Shereen Saifudeen, a second generation Keralite settled in Dubai, was part of the team last year too. An architect by profession, she had made a career detour into marketing and advertising and now has her fingers in a business administration degree, Indian classical dance, veena and violin classes and also cartooning, i.e., apart from rowing.

Together, the women are teaming up with Jayasree Travels, which is arranging for their alliance with the Vembanad Vanitha Boat Club.

Dressed in traditional ‘kasavu’ saris, the women drew large crowds as they practided for the race on the Punnamada Lake here on Tuesday.

Dennis Marcus Mathew

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