NEW DELHI: Aad aneel anaad anaahat jug jug ayko vays. This exact line appears once again at the end of four consecutive stanzas, Pauris 28, 29, 30 and 31, of Japji Sahib, composed by Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, in the opening composition of the Guru Granth Sahib.Translated, it reads approximately as: The One is primary, stainless, without beginning, self-existent (unstruck), and the same in all ages.Japji Sahib opens the Guru Granth Sahib, the central scripture of Sikhism, and is the prayer devout Sikhs recite every morning as part of their daily practice. Introduced in that refrain is the word anaahat, which means unstruk, unbeaten, a sound that exists without ever being produced by collision.
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It is also, as it happens, the name of one of the most exciting young athletes in Indian sports, Anahat Singh.“My husband was with her,” Anahat’s mother Tani Vadera Singh had earlier told TimesofIndia.com. “He read Sikh prayer, Japji Sahib. And in the last line, there is, you know, the name Anahat.”On March 13, 2008, Gursharan Singh was reading the prayer in the hospital room on the day his daughter was born. Something about the word stopped him.“He said, you know, this sounds really good,” Tani recalled. “I want to call him that. So that’s what (Anahat was called).There was no big plan behind it, and there wasn’t even behind his sports career, at least not before.The Singh-Vadera house was simply sporty. Tani played hockey for Delhi at the sub-junior and junior levels; Gursharan played hockey at St. Stephen’s College and had hoped to play for India before academics took over. Uncle Deepak Vadera was once one of India’s best table tennis players. Anahat’s older sister Amira played tennis before switching to squash, and Anahat herself started badminton at age six, following the simple family rule that sports mattered as much as school.
“We always believe that sports are as important as studies,” admitted Tani.Anahat dragged her sister into squash later, and the family openly admits they had no idea what they were building.“We obviously didn’t imagine all of this happening,” Tani added. “We just played for fun.”Gursharan, who had never played the sport himself, taught himself squash so he could help train, working alongside his coaches. It was light for years, Anahat wanted, at five years, to be Olympic champion, although it was painting badminton at the time, not the sport that he would eventually take to a world stage.The turn to seriousness came once he made the Commonwealth Games team at 13, a milestone marked by his mother when the “fun” moment began to share space with real expectation.That balance of joy and intensity has produced a resume that most players twice his age would envy.
Anahat, true to its meaning
Anahat debuted for India at 14 at the 2022 Commonwealth Games, winning Asian games medals at 16, and climbed into the world’s top 20 as he transitioned to the senior circuit.On Saturday, the 18-year-old added the feat that could end up defining her junior career, becoming the first Indian to win the World Junior Squash Championship, beating Egypt’s Ruqayya Salem 3-0 in the final in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada, without dropping a single match in the entire tournament.He had beaten two other Egyptian players on the way, a country that had held this exact title for sixteen consecutive years. The last non-Egyptian to win it all was American Amanda Sobhy, in 2010.READ ALSO: Once played by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, bridge seeks India’s ‘chess’ moment: How 17-year-old Anshul Bhatt is leading its revivalIt’s a fitting full circle. A name raised by the prayer of Guru Nanak has traveled from the pace of a morning recitation to the biggest stage in junior squash. Anahat Singh gave a new association of his own to be at the balance and permanence that he came to represent.
