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I was really disheartened to know about Santhi Soundarajan’s attempt at suicide. There is still some confusion about her current health condition. The doctors says she could slip into coma but the police say that she is stable. I’ll take the doctor’s word in this case.
It is reported that Santhi had slipped into heavy depression after her silver medal in 800 meters at the Doha Asian Games was taken away for failing the gender test. Before writing this post, I read a few articles on gender testing that quote gynecologists saying that malnutrition can negatively effect growth of female hormones and affect menstruation cycles. This could have been used in the appeals process by India authorities but instead choose to send Santhi back after the “disgrace”. The appeal process was never exercised in her case by our sports authority
I, myself have attended state football camps and can vouch for the deplorable support conditions that we had. The daily allowance given to us was Rs. 5/- which we used to purchase indigestion tablets for the semi-cooked food that we got. And this was for football which is relatively a better looked after sport in India. So my heart goes out to the Indian athletes, especially the ones from villages who have immense talent but no financial/health support.
Keep Running Santhi..
by Aditya | on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 2:18 am | 
Governance, India, Sports . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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November 18th, 2007 at 8:29 pm reply
Very sad and pity on Santhi’s past (after her medal took back from her) and present condition. She has done an unimaginable achievement even though she comes from poor village family. I knew the pain of gossiping, craziness and discouragement when living in a village at similar situation of Santhi. Tamilnadu Government should give a job to her for her better life as an appreciation of her achievements. She can bring the village girls out to the world by motivating them in sports and courage to face the tough world.