F2C Martial Arts & Life Skills

The fighting arts

Adimurai is the striking and locking art, built on varma points, the pressure points of the body. Silambam is the long bamboo staff, fought at distance with speed and footwork. Alongside them come Mallarkambam for grip and core strength, and Kusthi and Kattan Kusthi, the wrestling forms. Underneath all of it sit forty-six traditional games, the ones village children used to play, which is how reflexes and body awareness get built before anyone throws a strike.

• Adimurai, strikes, locks and varma point knowledge
• Silambam, the bamboo staff
• Mallarkambam, pole and rope work
• Kusthi and Kattan Kusthi, the wrestling forms
• 46 traditional games as the foundation

You learn to strike, and you learn to undo it

This is what separates Adimurai from a striking sport. A varma strike lands on a specific point, and the same map that tells you where to hit tells you how to release it again, so the art is taught in both directions at once, and slowly, because half of it on its own would be dangerous. Out of that same knowledge comes the treatment practice, hands-on therapy worked over roughly two and a half hours a session, taught inside the syllabus rather than beside it.

Who it's for

Children from about six, teenagers, and adults who have never trained before. The first grade is literally called Mazhalai Veeran, the toddler warrior, and it assumes you know nothing. Training is on open ground, barefoot, early in the morning. There's no equipment to buy to begin with.

How the grading works

Each grade carries a fixed number of training days, from 21 at the first three levels to 90 at the last three. You aren't moved up on age or on fees, you're moved up when you can do the syllabus. The sash colour changes every three grades, so the ladder below is really seven stages of three. Reaching white takes years, and that's the point.

The life-skills half

The other half of the programme is what a person used to learn growing up in a village and mostly doesn't any more. We don't teach children about money, we teach what they can actually do: ten cows are wealth if you can milk them, five acres are wealth if you can farm them. Somebody taught properly comes out able to start something, not just to join something.

• Cooking taught properly, to boys and girls alike, in two or three days
• Coconut shells, seeds and rind saved and used, so almost nothing leaves the house as waste
• Native rice, the old medicine and reading the sky, the knowledge that goes in one generation if nobody hands it on

Making things with your hands

Every craft here is taught by somebody from the F2C network who does it for a living, not by a demonstrator. You leave having made the thing yourself.

• Coconut shell crafts
• Bamboo and palm products
• Stone sculpture
• Handloom weaving
• Beekeeping
• Biogas installation
• Homemade soap
• Wooden toys and stools

Where it leads

For some members these stay hobbies. For others they turn into work: a nursery, a small organic shop, a handloom or craft business, biogas installation, beekeeping for honey. F2C members already run all of these. We'd rather teach a trade than hand out a certificate.