CHENNAI: Crime reporter of DT Next Srikkanth Dhasarathy received the prestigious Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award for his feature story (August 24, 2024) narrating the life and achievements of Indumathi Kathiresan, arguably one of the greatest women footballers from Tamil Nadu.
The report traced the story back to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, in the aftermath of which, a government school teacher in Cuddalore took a bunch of girls under his wing and trained them to become footballers.
Two decades later, one of them, Indumathi, rose to the top echelons of Indian football to emerge as the mainstay of the national team’s midfield, and won many accolades, including the AIFF’s Best Women's Player of the Year award for 2023-24.
Indumathi’s story had heart, and in Srikkanth, it found the perfect narrator who went to its soul. He wrote about the Tamil Nadu police officer’s exploits on the ground, about her father Kathiresan and mother Amutha, and also the others like her first coach, S Mariappan, who played a key role in her emergence as a champion. It does take a village.
Interestingly, the sports beat is not the primary area that Srikkanth covers at DT Next. For the newspaper, he is a crime reporter, whose routine revolves around police stations, complainants, and courts. But as a writer who is always looking for the oft-missed aspects of every development, as a sports enthusiast who gets riled up about the space and resources sucked up by a few sports, he was the perfect storyteller to narrate Indumathi’s story.
Srikkanth credited his senior, veteran sports journalist TN Raghu, who brought Indumathi’s AIFF award to his attention. He collected the award from Vice President CP Radhakrishnan at an event in New Delhi on Friday.