ARTS / ENTERTAINMENT / SPORTS
Siddharth Surana: PGP-ABM 2005 (Sports, For Archery- Gold: Men’s Recurve, Veteran National Championship Mar’22)
Siddharth is a national level archer who has brought immense pride and glory to the country. Siddharth has won Gold and Bronze in Men’s Recurve in National Championship (2022) and won Silver medals in the Karnataka State Championships (2021 and 2022). Beyond Archery, Siddharth is also a high altitude trekker and has completed treks to Nangkartshang peak (5100 m), Mt Everest Base Camp (5364m), Kala Patthar (5644m) and Hampta Pass (4298m) in Nepal and India.
Siddharth’s contributions extend beyond the sports arena. He is the founder of AgriCentral, a tech platform that helps farmers make critical decisions and increase their profitability, now part of Jiva. Siddharth has also published Hindi poems and worked in theatre. He has also mentored AgTech startups and served as a mentor for IIMA alumni community.
How does it feel to be back on campus, and what does this award mean to you?
It definitely feels great to be back on campus. I am coming here after maybe more than 10 years, and I think a lot of the things have changed, but a lot has remained the same, especially the spirit with which the campus welcomes you, and the kind of warmth that we feel from even the current students and faculty. I think everyone has been receiving me very warmly, and that is something to look forward to again. This award really means a lot. I have received quite a few awards in my life so far, but I think this is the one which I would cherish the most. This is really close to heart, especially when it comes from alma mater that to an institute of repute like IIMA. So I think this is something which I didn’t even think that I will deserve, or I do deserve, but I think the Institute has been kind, also little jokingly, I told my batch mates, we have very active whatsapp group and on that, when this news came, I told that out of the three words in this award, I like the young the most. So jokes apart, I am very gratefully and very humbly receive this award.
You have taken up archery, which is a difficult sport, which requires a lot of practice. How did your interest in archery start?
I have been a sports person since my childhood, and I have been a very outdoorsy person. So any sport, if anyone is playing in front of me, I would just try. So that is something which comes naturally to me. In the early days, I played a lot of cricket. In fact, till college level, I followed a lot of cricket. I think I had an injury sometime in my fourth year of college. It was a very nasty injury—meniscus tear and ligament rupture. After that, I was never the same, because I used to be a fast bowler, and you can’t bowl fast when you have this knee injury. By now, I had three operations on the same knee. But after that, there was a big gap, because I could hardly get any time for sports and then I got sucked into corporate life. So when I moved to Bangalore in 2018 in Bangalore which has a good sporting culture, and quite a few sports arenas around you. I took up tennis as a sport but it requires a lot of running and moving with all twisting and turning. So it was getting hard on my knees, so I had to drop that. Then again, I got reminded of archery which I was always fascinated by. Also, there was a book called ‘The Archer’ by Paulo Coelho, in which he really, in great detail, describes each of the movements of the archer, what goes on in the mind, how he shoots the arrow–all that emotional connection that he established was imprinted on my mind. I thought, maybe I can start archery. Then I looked around and I found one coach who is a national level Archer but he was not really a great coach. Then I scouted for another Archery Academy, and I joined there, and I started in early 2021 and the first tournament I played was in October 2021 at state level, Karnataka, and I didn’t have even my equipment by then, and I was very reluctant but the academy coaches pushed me and I borrowed their equipment, and I won the silver medal at Karnataka State level. There was another state level tournament in February 2022 where I won a silver medal because of that, I qualified for the national level. That’s how my journey started three years ago.
Can you talk about your interest in high altitude trekking and your treks in Nepal and India?
I started late in life, the only trek I did before Everest base camp was a Trek to Singhagad in Pune. So the year 2022 was a momentous year for me, because I won the archery medals, and I also did the Everest base camp. And then I went to Indonesia and did those two volcanoes in a 24 hour span, which is a big deal. I trained for maybe about 3.5 months and I just signed up for the trek. I think I was half fit for that trek. There were a lot of challenges but the trek was really beautiful. You see so many high peaks around you. My funda in life is that whenever I do anything adventurous–be it scuba diving or snorkeling or high altitude trekking, if you see the beauty, you forget your fear. But if you start seeing those high peaks, those snow-clad mountains and the views and vistas, you would forget fear, and start enjoying it, so that has really helped. The next year, I took my wife along to another trek so that I could get easy approvals for further treks. She knows what it means and what all goes on in trek, and she also enjoyed it. In the last couple of years, we have been doing at least one good trek per year, and I hope to maybe increase it to two, let us see how it goes. When you are on the trek, you do a lot of self-talk and you can refine a lot of your thoughts which really helps to discover your limits and how you cope with challenging situations. In one of the tracks last year only, we did the Gomukh-Tapovan trek. There, we first faced a dust storm, then a rock fall, and then we had a snowstorm and rains, four different elements hit us, one after the other. But through it my wife and I thought that I can’t give it up now here, because our kids were waiting at home, and we both were stuck into that, and we just managed to pass through. So it helps you discover some aspects of how you cope in times of distress.
As a recipient of Young Alumni Achiever’s Award, what are your goals? What do you aim to achieve, professionally and personally?
I have been fortunate to be recognised with this award and quite a few other recognitions. But that’s not really the goal in life, right? Especially here on since I am already here, I think I can’t really hope for anything better from the institute side, but I think I just want to earn this award now fully, because I think I’ve been given something in advance, which I have to earn now. So I will try to be very cognizant of what I can give back to the community, especially the IIMA community, or the students. I am already working with some of the professors. How can I come back to the campus and share some of my learnings? Whichever way you know I can, and on a personal level, I think the only way to move is forward. So I will try to become a better archer, may become a better trekker and become a better human being in the process. So that’s how I just want to keep striving for improvement.
