Swimming in my thoughts

Not in water though

About this time fourteen years ago, in June 2009, Rajeev Motwani, a Stanford computer science professor, died at his home. He was only 47 years old. The police found him dead at the bottom of the swimming pool in his backyard.

Tests later revealed a high blood alcohol content. In addition, Motwani, according to his friends, did not know how to swim.

All through these years I remember his story for a number of reasons. Motwani was a mentor to many Silicon Valley technology entrepreneurs, including Larry Page and Sergey Brin—the founders of Google, which was one hot company 14 years ago and still is.

I didn’t know Motwani, but from the news reports I figured that I knew his wife—Asha Jadeja was a fellow graduate school student in the same program that I was studying.

There is a third and important reason that I remember Motwani’s death. Like him, I too do not know how to swim. I am alive to tell the tale though.

There is a simple and good reason that billions of people like me do not know how to swim: Lack of access.

Because we did not grow up with a river or a lake near our homes, we boys simply did not jump into the water and learn to float first and then swim. Culturally, parents were not focused on kids either, unlike modern parenting in which parents make sure that kids have lessons in swimming, soccer, ballet, piano, rocketry … well, of course, I am joking about rocketry.

Even now, I am not in the minority among the global population that sinks in water. Gallup reports that an overwhelming majority in low and lower-middle income countries can’t swim. It is not news to me. Resource starved countries aren’t going to “waste” money by building swimming pools for kids when a lot more investment is needed for their schooling itself. And how many kids live within walking distance of rivers and lakes for them to learn swimming, eh!

(Of course, one needs only a little bit of cultural competency to guess that even fewer women in those countries know how to swim.)

Even the neanderthals swam but not us modern homo sapiens!

Karen Eva Carr opens Shifting Currents with the startling information that today worldwide – for all Earth’s many rivers, creeks, lakes, ponds, seas and oceans, to say nothing of built pools, canals and theme parks – the majority of people can’t swim. People might bathe and wash their clothes in rivers and lakes, or undertake ritual ablutions in bathhouses, but the vast majority must keep their feet on the ground.

When we went to Pattamadai, the village where one grandma lived, the settlement was quite far from the river, the Thamirabarani. It is after all only a modern thinking that “controls” rivers, and then humans build homes right by the flowing water. Traditionally, people typically kept a respectful distance because, well, the last thing one wants is a flooding river flowing through one’s home!

A couple of times over the summer holidays, grandma and the extended family would take us kids to the river. It is by far one of our favorite memories. We bathed, ate the food from home or the poori/potato/vadai that was purchased from the local hole-in-the-wall, and also filled up a few containers with the tasty river water that we then drank at home for a couple of days. (Yes, the water was pretty darn clean even during our childhood, and we never had any GI issues from drinking that water.)

There were no swimming lessons though.

Now, maybe—and this is a big maybe—we might have learnt swimming if we had a grandfather. One—the Pattamadai grandfather—was dead when my father was an infant, and the other grandfather died when I was about four years old. If anything, I can argue that a grandfather may have taught us how to swim. But, yes, the fact remains that there were no swimming lessons at the Thamirabarani.

A friend, who knows that I swim like a rock, sent a link to a report with a headline that is seemingly designed for people like me: “It's never too late to become a strong swimmer. Here's how to start”

Encouraged by the title, I read the piece where I swam, er, ran into this sentence: “If you're having a hard time finding a swim teacher you click with, "Do not give up because you will find that teacher”

Have I tried without giving up!

As a graduate student at USC, I signed for a beginner-level swimming class. The teaching assistant told me to get into the pool and hold on to the side wall. He said that my body would automatically lift up after which I was supposed to continue holding on to the wall while kicking my legs.

I did what he said. Except I did not, could not float.

He was stumped. Apparently he had never seen anybody whose body just didn’t begin to float. There’s always a first time, I suppose.

A few years after that, a friend introduced me to her friend who was a high school swim coach. She, I think Teri was her name, bragged that she could teach anybody how to swim.

Within a few minutes, after she witnessed how rapidly I sank to the bottom, she admitted that she had never panicked in her coaching life as she did when I went underwater. She, too, could not fathom (ahem, that was a pun) why I couldn’t float.

I have been forever on the lookout for a coach who knows how to help adults learn swimming. Which is why I was so enthused by this sentence in the helpful link from the friend: “You can go to the U.S. Masters Swimming website and search for instructors who specifically teach adults near you.”

I went to that site. I entered my zip code.

One of these days, Alice, one of these days ;)