“You have ruined my life. You don’t even let me sleep.”
Those were the tearful words seven-year-old Ishank Singh cried out when forced awake at 5 AM for gruelling training sessions. His mother’s response left no room for compromise: “If you want to be different from the world, you have to do what the world won’t.”
For middle-class parents in India, pushing a child to elite, world-first heights requires a radical level of sacrifice. It looks like a mother chasing multi-departmental Ministry approvals, or a father resigning from a stable career just to anchor his children to an undefined goal.
This is not a story about achieving the “Mount Everest of swimming.” It is a story about parents who chose the lonely, expensive, and emotionally exhausting path of an unknown sporting platform—sacrificing the normalcy of a household, so their children could conquer the ocean.
REFUSING TO BACK DOWN
In a country where competitive sports infrastructure is sparse, a distinct shift is happening. Parents are trading standard pool lanes for the boundless unpredictability of the open sea to help their children truly “stand out.”
Kamya, a second-year Delhi University student from Gurgaon, Haryana, was never built for the ocean. By her own admission, her body type defied the traditional swimmer’s archetype.
“Everyone said I was short, bulky, and not built for it,” she says. She was a pure sprinter, built for explosive 50 metre pool events. But when a devastating ankle injury in 2023 ended her pool career, she fell into a dark space, ready to quit entirely. Her father, Sunil Bhardhwaj, refused to let the water go.
“I remember that day vividly,” Sunil recalls, his voice tightening. “We were at the Sports Injury Centre three to four times a week. Kamya had been keeping this immense pain inside, torturing herself. One day, sitting right there in the medical centre, the dam broke. We both sat there and just cried. She wept in her heart felt light. From that day, I told her: ‘Beta, look, what we have to do, we have to do.'”
He shifted her horizon entirely toward open water. When Kamya completed the gruelling 81 km Murshidabad river swim, the world’s longest, Sunil didn’t see a finished journey; he saw a stepping stone.
He looked at the notorious Palk Strait and raised the stakes: a double-way national record from India to Sri Lanka, and back.
“I told my father I couldn’t do a double-way,” Kamya admits. “It was my father who believed. He said we wouldn’t settle for a single crossing.”
NO TIME TO WAIT
While Kamya’s father operated on raw emotion, seven-year-old Ishank’s mother, Manisha Sinha, approached the ocean with the deliberate, unyielding calculation of a former athlete who refused to let her child be ordinary.
An engineer and marathon runner from Ranchi, she noticed Ishank’s obsessive affinity for water when he was a toddler. By age five, he was swimming five kilometres a day. But the Indian sporting system offered no competitive space for a child his age, strictly enforcing a nine-year-old limit for tournaments.
“Because of the age criteria, local pools wouldn’t take him,” Manisha explains. “But his stamina was boundless. So we decided: Why wait for the system? Let’s put him in open water now so that by the time he is legally old enough to compete, he will already have a world record in his pocket.”
For three months, the family entered a bureaucratic battlefield, chasing clearances from the Sri Lankan Government, the Indian Navy, the Coast Guard, the Home Ministry, and the Ministry of External Affairs, requiring personal intervention from Jharkhand’s Minister of State for Defence just to secure a date.
Financially, maternal grandparents and parents pooled their life’s earnings to fund Ishank’s expedition. The financial gamble was staggering for the Bhardwaj family as well, requiring nearly Rs 10 lakh, but the true cost of the crossing was going to be much more than the money.
TERRORS OF THE DARK WATER
On April 12, at 1:30 PM, when Kamya jumped into the ocean, passing ships’ discharged diesel reacted with the protective grease on her skin, causing her entire body to burn.
She began screaming. However, with the help of ointments, she swam through it, reaching Sri Lanka at 10:35 PM before turning back into the pitch black toward India.
The pitch dark, though, brought more disaster with it. A jellyfish brushed her ankle, paralysing her with its sting.
“I stopped floating. I couldn’t kick,” Kamya recalls. “I called out to my dad.”
From the deck, Sunil watched his daughter freeze in the dark water, helpless.
“I completely panicked,” he confesses. “I swallowed my pride and told her, ‘Beta, if you feel like you can’t do it, just come back up.’
But she looked at him and said, ‘No, Dad, I won’t come back. Even if I die here, I won’t quit.'” Her resilience was fuelled by pure respect for her father, a refusal to let his years of sacrifice go to waste.
The medical team administered her with drugs and for the next hour, she pulled herself across the ocean using just raw upper-body strength. But more than the drugs, it was her father cracking jokes from the deck, teasing her about her Instagram handle, ‘Little Fit Fish’, that gave her the strength to push herself beyond her limits.
18 days later, on April 30, at around 2 AM, a severe storm had lashed the Sri Lankan border, violently shaking a vessel with a seven-year-old kid onboard.
“That was the one moment I felt true terror,” Ishank’s mother, Manisha, admits. “Looking at the dark, churning sea, my heart sank. For a second, as a mother, I panicked completely, wondering what on earth I was putting my child into.”
But by 4 AM, that very seven-year-old kid, without a hint of fear in his eyes, leapt into the black, churning sea just to conquer the world at his mother’s behest.
For nearly ten hours, Ishank swam against a punishing reverse current. But, because a kid his age can easily lose focus in the stark emptiness of the ocean, his coach swam alongside him in a kayak, while his parents kept shouting from the rescue boat to not let his mind drift away.
TRADING COMFORT FOR GREATNESS
When both Kamya and Ishank landed on the Indian shore, shattering records, their parents had an overwhelming top-of-the-world release.
“I had no words left,” Sunil says, the emotion raw. “Tears just streamed down my face, pure tears of joy. I felt on top of the world.” A feeling that resonated with Ishank’s mother.
The families of Kamya and Ishank are part of a new generation who look at things completely differently. They are inventing their own rules to make sure their children genuinely stand out.
Instead of looking at the ocean’s dangers and backing away, these parents see the wild water as the ultimate classroom to teach real grit.
“If you want your child to make a name for themselves that the whole world hears, you have to match their effort by giving up your own life completely,” Manisha explains proudly. “You can’t raise a kid while holding onto your own comforts. You have to be in the mud building their future right alongside them, stepping way past what is safe and easy.”
Ishank, for now, will drop the thrill of open water, for he and his mother have eyes on the Olympics and making their nation proud.
For Sunil, this way of thinking completely changed his life’s direction. He left his stable career years ago to manage his children’s sports full-time, running small side-businesses just to pay for pool time and fund the massive costs of global channel swimming.
Next up for Kamya are the English and North Channels, which will cost over Rs 30 lakh per swim. And while she is doing everything to find a major corporate sponsor, her father is willing not to stop even if it costs him every penny he owns.
– Ends
