“I thought of the story because Kabaddi was shown on British television in the 1990s,” says the swashbuckling James Crabtree, Mumbai Correspondent, Financial Times, who has been featured on these pages earlier, inspecting terrorist memorabilia in Jaffna on one occasion and acting in a Bollywood movie on another.

He was talking about the story he had written on the sport for that most buttoned-down of British institutions-the Financial Times. “Channel 4 had a remit to show obscure sports no one had ever heard of, like sumo, American football, and then Kabaddi.