Paratrooper general dances tango at world championship in Buenos Aires
Lieutenant General Manoj Kumar Unni (retd) and his partner, Shreya Shah, danced the tango at the World Tango Championship in Buenos Aires, the only Indian pair in the annual contest
An Indian paratrooper general had just begun to learn salsa dance spins when one day he entered a tango class in Pune. By mistake.
Four-and-a-half years later, Lieutenant General Manoj Kumar Unni (retd) and his partner, Shreya Shah, danced the tango at the World Tango Championship in Buenos Aires, the only Indian pair in the annual contest.
Unni and Shah, among the 750 couples from 53 countries attending the ongoing event (Aug 19-27), almost made it to the semi-finals this week.
“We finished the preliminary rounds. We did two more rounds and got a decent score from the judges. But we didn’t make the cut for the semi-finals. Still, we are extremely pleased with our standing as it was our first foray on a world stage,” the 69-year-old Unni told Hindustan Times from Buenos Aires.
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A cardiac surgeon, he headed the Armed Forces Medical Services till October 2017 and served with the elite 9 Para (Special Forces) as the regimental medical officer during 1979-81.
A homemaker, Shreya holds a master’s degree in economics.
“We practiced four hours a day for the last four months. It was an exhilarating experience to dance alongside participants from so many countries including Russia, China, Japan, Korea and Indonesia,” he said.
“Being here is a dream come true...We knew the competition would be fierce, but the atmosphere, the people, everything was much more than we had imagined,” Shreya told Argentine daily La Nacion in an interview.
An alumnus of the Armed Forces Medical College, Pune, Unni was commissioned in the Army Medical Corps in February 1977.