You ring the bell in a DL Block house and an unassuming boy comes running to answer it before anyone else. He opens the door, sees you and flashes a warm smile. But he says nothing and runs back in to call others. In sign language. 

Surajit Deb Das is intellectually challenged. His mental development has not been at par with his age and he does not speak. He can just about write his name. 
But he can run. And his recent 50m run to the finish line at the 2015 Special Olympics World Summer Games fetched India a bronze medal.  

The Deb Das family lives in New Town’s Millennium Tower but often come to DL 12/5 in Salt Lake, where Surajit’s maternal uncle and his family live. He is the apple of everyone’s eye there, including neighbours who troop in to congratulate the champ. 

“We had never imagined that Surajit would one day win a medal for India. On the contrary, we were thinking twice about letting him go to a place as far off as Los Angeles without any of us,” says his father Subrata Deb Das. “But my younger son Biswajit, who lives in Melbourne, urged us to give it a shot.”

Against all odds 

Surajit was born in 1978 and within two years doctors diagnosed his condition. He joined several special schools and finally settled at the National Institute of the Mentally Handicapped (NIMH) in Bonhooghly. 

It is here that his sports skills were recognised and he started participating in games for special students. “I know Surajit since he was nine and his condition was way more severe then,” says his sports teacher at NIMH, Tamal Chatterjee. “But he liked sports. Of course, it takes a lot of patience to teach special students. For instance, it would take me four months just to teach him to lift his leg.” 

Surajit started winning district, state and even national level games before he was chosen for the Special Olympics in 2013. Thereafter, he attended five training camps in different cities, but his parents were not allowed to accompany him. 

“Students get distracted if guardians are around. They need to be independent,” says Surajit’s uncle Gopal Das as the boy struggles to eat a Dahi Vada his aunt Shova has served him. “God knows how he managed without us.”
The ever-smiling Surajit would return from camps and demonstrate how he was taught to run and throw the ball in shot put but sometimes he would get depressed if he saw his parents packing his bags for another camp. “Surajit loves mobile phones, even if he cannot speak. So we got him a phone before his Rae Bareli camp. He was very happy and he kept listening to FM channels on it throughout the camp. But it got stolen,” says father Subrata, a retired engineer.

Thereafter his parents gave him another phone but Surajit refused to take it on camps. 

The Olympic journey 

Ashim Paul, physical instructor at Manovikas Kendra, was the coach who led the Bengal contingent to Los Angeles on July 19. Surajit knew Paul from the national camps.  
“Surajit had the lowest ability among the seven Bengal athletes. He couldn’t eat or shave by himself and would need to be guided to the toilet so I shared a room with him,” says Paul.

The 50m run took place on July 27. “Surajit was in fact leading the race for the first 20m. But he tends to get insecure and started looking around for me in the middle of the race. That slowed him down,” recalls Paul, who immediately started shouting to assert that he was there and ran the rest of the distance on the sidelines alongside Surajit. That helped him regain speed and clinch the medal.

China came first and Kazakhstan second. Surajit clocked 14.59 seconds. “Surajit understood that he had done well and hugged me so hard at the finish line that he wouldn’t let go,” laughs Paul. 

US-based relatives of Surajit got news of the result and immediately called up his parents, who were fast asleep. “It was 5am here then,” smiles Subrata. They could not reach Surajit over phone but were in touch with the organisers over the internet.

Surajit also took part in the shot put event but was disqualified. It didn’t matter and the whole family went to give him a hero’s welcome at the airport on August 6, when the Bengal contingent returned. “Surajit ran to embrace us. He was wearing his medal,” says Subrata. “When we had dropped him of at the airport a couple of weeks ago, it was without any expectations. We just prayed that he face no problems on the trip. But not only had our son returned all right, he returned a winner.”

The expenses of the trip were borne by the Indian government and the Special Olympics committee paid him $250 for any expenses there.

The boy next door

Residents of Millennium Tower felicitated their champion on Independence Day and friends and neighbours have been pouring in with wishes. “I know Laltuda (Surajit’s nickname) came third in the world but I came third in DL Block’s sports day last time,” said little Raktim Roy, an eight-year-old neighbour, checking out the medal. “Even I shall try to win a bronze in the Olympics some day.”

Surajit cannot speak of his experience in LA but his family asserts that it has changed him. “Previously he wouldn’t sit still but now he sits for hours as guests come to meet him. He has overcome his shyness,” says Gopal.

Father Subrata urges parents of other special children not give up on them. “They may not be able to do what normal children can but they have the potential to express themselves in their own way.”

The family is organising a get-together to celebrate Surajit’s success at GC 114 on August 23 at 5pm and all are welcome to come and wish him there, they say. 

History of the Games 

The Special Olympics is a global-level multi-sport event for children and adults with intellectual disabilities. 
The initial avatar of the games was “Camp Shriver” in the US in 1962. It was started by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, 
sister of former US President John F. Kennedy. 

Simultaneously Canadian professor Frank Hayden found through research that people with intellectual disabilities can and should participate in physical exercises as it helps in their overall development. Hayden approached Shriver’s mother, Rose Kennedy, for help as she too had a daughter with intellectual disability (Eunice’s sister Rosemary).

With the Kennedys’ support, the first International Special Olympics Summer Games were held in 1968 in Chicago and the games got recognised by the International Olympic Committee in 1988. 

The most recent games were held in July and August 2015. The event was opened by US First Lady Michelle Obama and more than 6,000 athletes took part from 165 countries, including India.

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