A 5-minute walk from my in-laws’ house in Tiruvan­miyur, off the East Coast Road (ECR), you hit the beach. Residents of bungalows, apartment blocks like Sunrise, Marutham, Mullai, Neithal, Thamarai and Thendral, Journalist Colonies and kuppams live near the one kilometre promenade named Sea World and Water Land Drives.

Ken ... and his float (above) before he soars at sea level (left).

Around 5.30 one evening, in the middle of summer, there were more than the usual number of people, young and old, enjoying the outdoors. Never mind that it was a weekday. I had decided to plonk myself near the shore, save my breath, exercise my writing skills ad let my companion, my brother-in-law, do the physical bit.

I was not really feeling the sea breeze to gauge whether it was particularly windy. All of a sudden, my peripheral vision caught sight of this largish and colourful U-shaped flying thing in the sky. It wasn’t an unidentified flying object, but was in fact propelling a surfer, almost a rare event on our city’s beaches.

Feeling a sense of vicarious exhilaration, my immediate thought was that I had to capture with camera the spectacular surface water sport that was unfolding before my eyes. But camera-less, I remained content watching the float dance to the tune of the winds.

In a while, curiosity getting the better of me, I set out to meet the adventure sports­person who had, meanwhile, made his landing and became somewhat inconspicuous in the expanse of the sand. After a woman pleaded ignorance and a beach cricketer pointed into the distance, I met a foreigner of medium build and introduced myself. Ken, in his self-effacing manner, told me that the sport he was indulging in was kite surfing ... and he loved being on the ocean. Effusive about the good wind that day, he needed to fly the partly inflatable kite and surf on his board with foot straps and controls in his hand.

An elementary art school teacher, he had been in Chennai for the past three years. He has had 25 good days of kite surfing since last October. While he senses good days for surfing, he also relies on the Internet to look for the winds. Ken has been kite surfing for the past five years, from the age of 47, but never overlooks the care that goes into participating in this ‘extreme sport’. Though he initially took lessons in California (he is from San Fernando Valley, California), he is largely self-trained. He has been in Dar-es-Salam in Africa where he kite surfed on the Indian Ocean. In Chennai, there are only four other fellow kite surfers with whom he can share notes. The city’s beaches are fantastic, with great recreation potential, he says, and adds that his first impression that the water was polluted was proved wrong.

“As a foreigner who has seen beaches worldwide (of course, I realise the challenges the city faces with over-population, limited funds, stressed infrastructure, etc), I just want to say that Chennaiites could be very proud of their beaches if they worked a bit at keeping them clean and free of litter. It’s a bit sad to see such a beautiful place of nature trashed,” Ken signed off.