I wanted to find athletes that were off the radar," says swimwear designer Maayan Sherris, who first started her Babes in Bathers series in 2016, with the women's swim team of Columbia University. The motivation behind it: to find real women to wear and model in her athletic, double-layered, technically sound swimsuits, designed to swim, work and move in. Last year, she thought of India, after e-meeting national swimming champion and Mumbaikar, Aditi Dhumatkar, who is a sprinter training at the Padukone-Dravid Centre for Sports Excellence in Bengaluru. A year later, her two-minute video, In pursuit of Excellence, featuring Dhumatkar, Faridabad's Divya Satija (India's fastest 50-metre butterflier), Srishti Nag from Bilaspur (another butterflier) and Trisha Karkhanis (all traning in Bengaluru), sporting her blue-hued swimwear, is now up for release, along with a lookbook as well.

Shot in a country obsessed with cricket, the video with these fresh, excited female swimmers, is a treat to watch. The girls, whose lean, supple and tall bodies fill the swimsuits well, are smart, opinionated and ambitious. While Dhumatkar likes the pain that comes with training, Nag talks of her grandfather building her a two-lane swimming pool at their home in Bilaspur, after her national-level swimmer father, Vishwajit, made sure she won a medal in a sub-junior competition.