NALSAR's Kabaddi Legacy

Sport has always been the greatest and most serious part of my life. In 2021, I won a National Gold medal representing Telangana; Sport was never a hobby for me. It was the organising principle of my life — the thing I structured every day around, the thing I was, before I was anything else. And then CLAT happened, as it happens to all of us, and I did what the exam demands: I put the sport down. You cannot half-prepare for CLAT while chasing a national sporting career; the exam does not permit divided loyalties, and so I chose law, and in choosing it I quietly closed a door I had spent my whole life walking through. I made my peace with it, more or less. I told myself law school would be many things, and that adrenaline would not be one of them. This is the part of the story where I was completely, gloriously wrong.

Because I got to NALSAR expecting the life of the mind, and what I found instead was a culture of pure, raw, barely-contained adrenaline growing quietly under the surface of a law school. I had not been on campus long before the kabaddi captain found me — recruited me, really, in the way these things happen — and almost before I had unpacked, we were training. It turns out you do not stop being an athlete just because you have started being a law student. The body remembers, the hunger remains.

I am the captain of NALSAR's kabaddi team now, and we have come a very long way from where we stood in my first year. I want to be fair and say what needs saying: NALSAR loves all sports. Football, cricket, volleyball, all of it, played hard and cheered hard, and NALSAR has been the undisputed champion at the Trilaterals across the board. But every campus has a few core sports, the one that is not just played but believed in — and ours is kabaddi. It is the one that empties the hostels and fills the sidelines. When the tournaments come, and the crowds gather, they are not gathering for the elegant sports. They are gathering for the mat.

And nothing — I mean nothing — beats what happens there. There is no sight in inter-NLU sport quite like watching students from law schools across the country, future advocates and judges and policy-makers, brawling on a kabaddi mat with every bit of civilisation stripped away, fully surrendered to something far older than any of the statutes they can cite. It is the gladiators' pit of the NLUs. All that legal composure, all that carefully cultivated restraint, and then the whistle blows and the animal comes out — the raid, the grab, the desperate scramble back across the line with three opponents attached to you. You do not get to see people like this anywhere else. Kabaddi grants a permission the rest of law school revokes: the permission to stop being measured, and to simply go.

It is genuinely difficult to find NLU students — and at NALSAR especially — who will willingly sign up for what kabaddi actually costs. This is not Volleyball. There is contact, there is pain, there is real severe physical risk, and there is no hiding on a kabaddi mat; the sport finds you out instantly. Most people, understandably, would rather not. So every batch, I go looking for the rare ones — the few kids who arrive with that crude, uncoachable passion for the sport, the ones who look at the bruises as a feature rather than a warning. We have been lucky to keep finding them. Not many. We never need many. We just need the right ones, the ones who were quietly waiting for someone to hand them permission to let it rip.

So this is the closest thing to a recruitment pitch I know how to write, and I mean every word of it. If you are someone who loves high-contact sport, who has that thing in you that needs to break loose and go full-tilt every once in a while, who put a sport down for this exam the way I did and has been feeling the absence of it ever since — the kabaddi team at NALSAR will always have a place for you. Come find us. Or let us find you; we're rather good at that.

I thought law school was where my sporting life ended. It turned out to be where it found a second, stranger, more glorious form. I traded a gold medal for a captain's armband on a kabaddi mat, and on the days the crowd is roaring and someone from another NLU is hanging off my jersey as I lunge for the line, I promise you I am not thinking about what I gave up. I am thinking that I somehow got it back.

The mat is waiting. So are we.