Hockey wizard Major Dhyan Chand scores in Berlin again

NEW DELHI: On August 15 while India celebrates the 70th Independence Day, the Embassy of India, Berlin has another special reason to cheer. An unique exhibition on the life and times of hockey wizard major Dhyan Chand will be inaugurated on the same day at the Embassy premises.

German Olympians Natascha Keller and her brother Florian Keller will be present on the occasion. Their grandfather Erwin Keller had played against the Indian hockey team in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Natascha Keller herself has been a member of the German Women’s hockey team which won an Olympic Gold Medal in 2004. She was the flag bearer for Germany at the 2012 Summer Olympics, becoming the first female field hockey athlete being honored this way. Her brother, Florian Keller was also a part of the German national hockey team, which won the Gold Medal at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Three German MPs - Peter Stein, Kathrin Voglerand, Johannes Selle, the Chief of Protocol from the German Foreign Office, Jürgen Mertens and the mayor of Rothenburg, Dieter Kölle are also expected to join the event.

For the first time ever, besides pictures of his on-field wizardry, several honors received by Major Dhyan Chand and his personal artifacts will be on display.

These include his Olympic coat and tie, his spectacles, several personal framed pictures and original recordings of training sessions and the Olympic Final in Berlin 1936. The exhibition will also show copies of German newspaper articles about the Indian team from the media coverage of the Olympics in Berlin.

Among the pictures displayed in the exhibition will be the photograph of a 30-foot statue his fans have built atop a hill in his hometown Jhansi. The exhibition will also display the commemorative postage stamp which the postal department had brought out on December 4, 1980.

The bilingual exhibition is scheduled to run for a month at the Indian Embassy in Berlin.