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23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Olympic Speed Climbing Champion Sam Watson to Visit Mumbai

Mumbai: When Sam Watson sprints up a 15-metre wall, the world seems to slow down. The 19-year-old American speed climber, an Olympic medallist from Paris 2024 and current world-record holder at 4.64 seconds, has become the face of one of the world’s fastest-growing sports. On November 2, he will trade competition arenas for Mumbai’s High Rock in Powai, offering a rare day of workshops and conversations with India’s burgeoning community of climbers. Speed climbing, once a fringe pursuit of...

Olympic Speed Climbing Champion Sam Watson to Visit Mumbai

Mumbai: When Sam Watson sprints up a 15-metre wall, the world seems to slow down. The 19-year-old American speed climber, an Olympic medallist from Paris 2024 and current world-record holder at 4.64 seconds, has become the face of one of the world’s fastest-growing sports. On November 2, he will trade competition arenas for Mumbai’s High Rock in Powai, offering a rare day of workshops and conversations with India’s burgeoning community of climbers. Speed climbing, once a fringe pursuit of mountaineers, now stands as one of the Olympics’ most electrifying disciplines. The sport demands not just power and agility but precision measured in hundredths of a second. Watson, often hailed as the greatest speed climber of all time, has repeatedly rewritten the record books. His visit marks a milestone for India’s fledgling climbing scene. High Rock, the city’s first commercial climbing facility, opened its walls in December 2024 and has since drawn more than 10,000 enthusiasts. It represents the country’s growing fascination with vertical sports and a reflection of a global shift toward adventure and athleticism fused with technology and training science. During his visit, Sam Watson will conduct Masterclasses for both Kids and Adults, offering a rare opportunity for amateur climbers to learn directly from a global champion and experience his unmatched energy and technique up close. Watson will be joined by Matt Groom, the Official Lead Commentator for the International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC). Known as the voice of IFSC World Cups and World Championships, Groom will host a 30-minute talk at High Rock on ‘The Evolution of Climbing in Competitive Sport.’ His insights promise to provide a deep look into the transformation of climbing from niche adventure to Olympic spectacle. Event: Sam Watson, Olympic Medalist and current World Record holder at High Rock Date: November 2, 2025 Location: High Rock, Powai, Mumbai

Dot Discord

For all their noisy lectures on diversity, many white Americans still recoil at the sight of a brown woman rising to power, especially when she dares to wear her heritage on her forehead. This ugly truth resurfaced recently after Mathura Sridharan, a brilliant Indian-origin lawyer, was appointed as the solicitor general of Ohio.


Within hours, online bigots, either unable or unwilling to grasp the distinction between citizenship and skin tone, began spilling bile. Other trolls jeered at her ‘dot,’ as if the bindi - a mark of cultural identity - somehow diminished her qualifications. Despite Sridharan being a US citizen, a product of MIT and NYU, and already a decorated legal mind within the state’s conservative legal establishment, it did little to stem the tide of xenophobic resentment against her.


Her boss, Attorney General Dave Yost, came to her defence, stating plainly that if someone was disturbed by her name or complexion, it was their problem. One wishes such clarity were more common. What happened to Sridharan is a classic case of the white American’s reflex of suspicion and derision toward Indians, especially those who succeed.


It is the same impulse that animated the now-infamous New York Times cartoon mocking India’s 2014 Mars mission, depicting a turbaned man with a cow knocking on the doors of an elite space club. It is what fuels every sneer about Indian tech CEOs ‘taking over’ Silicon Valley. It is the same lazy disdain that surfaces during Indian elections, when Western media describe the world’s largest democracy as a circus of caste and chaos. Or worse, a ‘Hindu supremacist-fascist dictatorship’ for the eleven years Modi and the BJP have been in power.


This knee-jerk condescension is a lingering colonial hangover. It springs from the same well as the ‘White Man’s Burden’ updated for the social media age. India, for many Americans, is still a land of snake-charmers and slums, incapable of producing capable professionals without Western tutelage. That perception lingers despite the fact that India is now the world’s fourth-largest economy and home to one of the most dynamic tech sectors on earth.


When Indians do make it abroad, they are expected to shed their accents, abbreviate their names and certainly never wear a bindi to court. The moment they display pride in their identity (as Sridharan evidently does) they become targets of suspicion. Today, one in every five doctors in the United States is of Indian origin. Indian-Americans have among the highest per capita incomes, educational attainment and professional representation in the country. Yet they remain foreigners in the eyes of those whose definition of ‘American’ is no broader than a bathroom mirror.


The bitter irony is that the very country that prides itself on meritocracy flinches when merit comes wrapped in brown skin and a Sanskrit-sounding name. In Mathura Sridharan’s appointment, Ohio gained a talented jurist. The backlash to it, meanwhile, reveals how far America still has to travel before it can walk its talk on equality.

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