Pragnya Mohan

This is by no stretch of the imagination a long shot because in her sports, athletes peak between the ages of 28 and 32. America’s Gwen Jorgensen won the gold at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics when she was 30. And Gwen has many similarities with Pragnya, not the least of which is that the US superstar is a CPA who worked as a tax accountant in EY!

To be-there-and-do-it, the Indian, a CA-triathlete, will have to swim, cycle, and run.

A triathlon is an endurance race consisting of swimming, cycling, and running over various distances. The winning triathlete is the one who clocks the fastest overall completion time

The story begins in Ankleshwar, Gujarat.

In the 1990s, IIT-IIM alumnus Pratap Mohan worked with Gujarat Guardian, a float glass company that later competed with the French-major Saint-Gobain. Promoted as a joint venture between USA’s Guardian Group and India’s House of Modis, the company had a plush industrial township dotted with scenic greenery and 100 large duplex houses.

Mohan lived in one of these houses with his mother, wife Subhashini, and two children, Prateek and Pragnya. This is the tale of his daughter.

Pragnya, the Hindi-speaking Ahmedabad girl, was thrown into the baby end of a swimming pool when two years old. While her brother, Prateek, a later-day national chess player, hardly liked Michael Phelps’ profession; Pragnya took to swimming like a duck to water.

At one end of the pool, Dad taught his son to float in water, kick and move around; at the other end, his daughter, with floaters on, busily copied her father’s strokes.

Prganya’s love for water had begun in right earnest.

The Chanderbala Modi Academy, a CBSE school, was located inside the township and open to both Guardian and non-Guardian kids. This is where Gitanjali Choudhury came into Pragnya’s life.

Gitanjali, a former national swimmer and NIS coach, was the school’s sports tutor. She used a smart move to get kids accustomed to the pool. In turn, each child lay on the teacher’s back as she swam the length of the pool. The ride reminded Pragnya of the monkey on the crocodile’s mound in a fabled Panchatantra tale. Excited, she got hooked on swimming.