On a new high

Volleying their way to victory in a cliffhanger final at the Open Maharashtra Volleyball Tournament, the All-Parsees team recorded a landmark by being the first team of all Zoroastrian players to win an open, state-level volleyball tournament.

Strapping six-footers all, captain Farhad Irani and players Zyros Zend, Freddy Nariman, Nauzer Dubash, Abad Irani (the tallest at almost 6 ft 5 in) and Rayumand Irani were among the 16 teams who participated in the day-long tournament held at the railway grounds at Dhaund, an hour away from Poona in January this year. With three players (Zend, Nariman and Dubash) being Bombay denizens, they set out for Poona by car at dawn to join their Poona teammates, playing and winning three games to reach the finals, lifting the trophy and returning to Bombay exhausted but triumphant at two o’clock next morning!

"Since half of us are from Poona and half from Bombay, we get virtually zero practice together as a team,” Zend told Parsiana. But with each player being very fit and in constant practice by playing for his college, his baug or his company, the team gels together at short notice. "We play a totally different game,” explains Zend. "We attack from the outer side of the poles while other teams play more center. The opposition was extremely tough. We were down by four points in the last game. But summoning all our resources we won three points in a row and moved on to victory.” The tournament fielded some strong teams from the army, Poona’s renowned Deccan Gymkhana, etc and though the All-Parsees had reached the semi finals before, they had never savored victory at the state level, elaborates Zend.

The All-Parsees Club was founded 10 years ago and Farhad and Zarir Shroff have been the pillars of the Club, Zend narrates, adding laughingly that the minimum qualification to get into the volleyball team is that one should be over six feet tall! "We are very particular about the ‘all-Parsi’ angle,” he says. "We want to encourage more youngsters to play. We want to prove that we have something in us.”

With Poona’s Steelman Engineers being the sponsors of the team for this tournament, the All-Parsees are looking forward to involving more Parsi businesses in Poona in the sport as sponsors. "There is no dearth of supporters in Bombay,” he adds, with Peekay Wines, Union Press, the World Zoroastrian Organisation, Leopold Cafe, etc being among the sponsors of tournaments. Besides volleyball, the annual throwball, football and tug-of-war tournament conducted by the All-Parsees is a looked-forward-to event, attracting Parsi players from all over Bombay and as far as Thana, says Zend.

With the volleyball team ranging in age from below 20 to over 40, Rayumand and Abad are students of Wadia College in Poona, with Rayumand also a part of the Maharashtra junior team for the nationals in basketball. While 23-year-old Abad has just completed his MCom, 18-year-old Rayumand is studying in First Year BCom. Rayumand] is among the 20 or so youngsters shortlisted from all over India to attend a training camp in basketball at Ludhiana in Punjab in September, preparatory to selection of the Indian team for the Asian basketball championship in China this year. "I enjoy playing both volleyball and basketball,” he asserts. "In basketball you have to be more athletic as one has to run about quite a lot. In volleyball one needs to jump higher to spike the ball and to be more alert.” In 2000, Rayumand was in the under-16 Maharashtra team for the 17th Youth Nationals in basketball at Vashi in New Bombay where the team managed to reach the quarters. In 2001, he was in the Maharashtra under-19 basketball team for the junior nationals at Bhilai where the team once again moved up to the quarterfinal stage. At Goa in the 2002 nationals, they lost at the league stage, he narrates.

While Farhad is a real estate consultant, Dubash is a research scientist in a pharmaceutical company and Nariman a software consultant. Besides being at his father’s Yazdani Bakery at 5 a.m. every morning, Zend’s enterprising spirit has seen him launch Zyraa’s Fortune Cookie, scouting around initially in China and the US to procure the machine to make the cookies. Supplying most of the 5-star hotels and Chinese restaurants in Bombay their requirements of fortune cookies, Zend has expanded his customer base to Bangalore, Calcutta, Madras, Poona and Goa.