Saturday, March 20, 2010

From short distances to longer distances

I’m going to speak about Savio George Manatt, a classmate of mine at the Sainik School, years back. He was good at studies and excelled in outdoors, his favourites being the short distances of 100, 200, 400 and 800mts, on the athletics field. In these events, he’d stiff competition from Sankaran, who was a year junior to us and usually ended up doing well in the first two races but fell behind the junior in the 400 and 800mts prompting one of our masters, Mr. CG George(whose English was short of the threshold, but managed to convey the meaning anyways) to say and I quote, “Hm, Savio will beat Sankaran in the short run but in the long run, Sankaran will beat Savio”. Unquote.

Savio hails from a large Christian family- they’re eleven siblings- from central Kerala and his father, Manatt Varghese(popularly known as Vakkachan, who passed away about 20 years back, was an affluent landlord). On passing out from school, Savio did medicine and is currently practicing medicine at Chicago. His wife, Anne and two children, George and Mary Ann form his family. These days, mountain biking and running long distances have become his passion and in the place where he stays, there are ample opportunities to pursue his heart’s calling. So it was not surprising to get an earnest request from Savio, last week on our group mail, asking each of us for our best wishes and to pray for him to come out with flying colours in an 8 km run today, in his county. And Savio, being the likeable guy that he is, was flooded with a host of good wishes from his classmates on the group mail.

So Savio, let’s see you doing well – eh, in the long run!

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