One is the daughter of a cook at a yacht club from Siddipet; the other’s mother, a widow, works as a daily wager in a pickle factory in Suryapet. Breaking into the elite sport of sailing, the two girls — Lahiri Kommaravelly (15) and Suragani Eswa (16) — from Telangana are now bound for the Asian Games in Japan this September, in the 29ers two-person boat feeder-class youth category.

Lahiri’s mother, Kavitha, struggled to make ends meet during the Covid pandemic in 2020. With her husband, a barber unable to earn a living, a desperate, Kavitha took the risk of working in a local hospital’s housekeeping department. But her family’s life changed when the Hyderabad Yacht Club hired her as a cook and the club’s president, Suheim Shaikh, offered to train her three daughters in sailing.

Shaikh, a former IITian and entrepreneur, sailed for over five decades, inheriting the generational privilege, while he realised that access to the Hussain Sagar lake waters in Hyderabad was a preserve of the elite.…