A team of Govindas from Mumbai’s Dahi Handi Samanvay Samiti (DHSS) will be performing at Concurs De Castells, a human tower competition being held in Tarragona, Spain on Saturday.
Eighteen Govindas have been invited as guest participants for Concurs De Castells, a biennial event organised by the Tarragona City Hall. It is a Catalan tradition where various teams will build human towers, with some going almost nine stories high.
DHSS Govindas had been invited as guests to perform at the event twice before in 2006 and 2011, and once to the U.S. in 2014 for the Global Tower Building Challenge.
“We have been invited to perform abroad thrice before and we are going again this year. To represent our country in such a manner has humbled all of us,” member of DHSS, Abhishek Surve, said.
With the minimum age to become a DHSS Govinda being six, the youngest member, Mudra Hegde is 10 and will be climbing to the top to complete the tower. Mr. Surve along with Surendra Panchal, Srikrishna Padekar and David Fernandes have been practising for almost a month after receiving the invite for the event in August.
“We now hope to be invited to compete at the 28th summit of the Concurs De Castells which would be held in 2020. That is our ultimate goal,” Mr. Surve said.
The Govindas left Mumbai early this week for Spain. “We are on a high right now. We still cannot believe they have called us once more. We are very grateful to everyone in Maharashtra who came out to support us,” Mr. Surve said.
The group will be visiting different places like Vilafranca and Barcelona and perform four to five-tier human pyramids. “This is a good opportunity for us to learn new techniques used by them to form a human pyramid. Ten-tier is our record,” Mr. Surve said. The team will be back in Mumbai on October 10.
In 2014, a 16-member women’s team from DHUSS had visited Times Square in New York for a similar competition.
