That sentence is too small for what actually happened. Let me try again.

In March 1990, the same month sister chapters were being founded in Bangalore and Madras, Eric McGaw — recently arrived in Hyderabad, brought to India by a job at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics — laid the first trail of the Hyderabad Hash House Harriers. He marked it in flour, much to the joy of the local livestock, who ate the trail greedily and would later force us to change from flour to chalk or lime to prevent it from happening. Every Sunday, the hills would hear the cries of "On On!" as the city's expatriate community (and growing handful of curious Indians) to accompany him through the rocky landscape on the edges of the Deccan Plateau. Thirty-five years later, it is still going strong and you can join them every Sunday without fail (visit https://hyderabadhash.com/)

What the Hash actually is

The Hash House Harriers are sometimes called "a drinking club with a running problem." The line is funny because it's accurate. The Hash was founded in Kuala Lumpur in December 1938 by a group of British expatriates living at the Selangor Club Annex — which was known, on account of its pedestrian food, as the Hash House. They wanted to run off their hangovers. They built it around the old British schoolboy game of hare and hounds: one or two hares set off ahead, scattering a trail of marks, and the rest of the pack — the harriers — follow, calling on, on when they find the trail and milling about in confusion when they don't. The trail is full of false leads, splits, and checks designed to keep the front-running bastards from leaving the slower walkers behind. The run ends in a circle: songs, beer, traditions, the bestowing of hash names. The hash name is permanent. It is rarely flattering. It is never the name your mother gave you.

The Hash spread out of Kuala Lumpur slowly at first — a few clubs in Singapore, Brunei, and Malaysia through the 1940s and 50s — and then explosively from the 1970s onward. By 1990 there were Hashes in nearly every major city in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, and the Americas. The model was always the same: expatriates, a trail laid in flour or chalk, beer at the end, and a kennel name that would make a Methodist faint.

What none of this captures is what the Hash actually does in the place it takes root. It builds a community. People who hash together for years end up at each other's weddings, funerals, baby showers, and divorces. They lend each other money. They watch each other's kids. The Hash is, in addition to being a drinking club with a running problem, an unusually durable form of friendship for adults who have moved far from home. That mattered, in 1990, in Hyderabad. It still matters now.

How H3 began

Eric had hashed before. He had been a Manila Boat Club rower for a decade, and the Hash community in the Philippines was substantial; he had run with kennels across Asia in the 1980s during his diving and editorial years. He arrived in Hyderabad in 1989 with a job, a wife, three small children, and the practical knowledge of how a Hash kennel actually gets started: how to lay a trail, how to invite the right early members, how to write the constitution loose enough that nobody takes it seriously and tight enough that the kennel survives its founders.

Hyderabad in 1990 was a smaller city than it is now. The expatriate community was modest — agricultural research scientists at ICRISAT, oil and engineering professionals, a scattering of diplomatic and consular families, the staff of multinational firms who had begun moving in as India's economy opened up. There was no US Consulate yet; that wouldn't open until 2008, and for years before it did, Eric himself served as Warden for the United States in Hyderabad, the unpaid private American citizen who handled embassy liaison for the local American community. The Hash drew from this expatriate world but also, deliberately, from the Indian executive class — managers at the local offices of multinationals, professionals at Indian companies, people who would not normally have shared a Sunday morning with the foreigners across town.

By the end of H3's first year, the kennel had thirty-five members. Half of them were local Indian executives. That was unusual. Most Hash kennels in Asia in 1990 were almost entirely expatriate. Some had been running for decades without integrating substantially with the local population. Hyderabad H3, in its very first year, was already half local. That tells you something about Eric and about the kennel he built. The line he drew between the foreign community and the city it lived in was deliberately porous from the start.

Business India

Within months of the kennel's founding, the magazine Business India sent a reporter out to Hyderabad to find out what the strange sight on Sunday mornings actually was. The article ran on page 43, under the headline "Running with the hares." It described what readers across India were beginning to glimpse: a hundred-odd executives, mainly expatriate, running through the streets of Indian cities shouting on, on. It quoted Eric. It described the new Hyderabad chapter as one of the kennels having been started in March of that year. It noted the half-and-half mix of expatriates and local professionals. It explained, with an air of delighted bemusement, the sponsorship arrangements: London Pilsner and Aquaspa as permanent backers, with Hotel Oberoi Towers in Bombay, Kone Elevator India Ltd in Madras, Essar, and Siemens supporting individual chapters.

It is a small thing, in the larger picture of his life, to have been quoted in Business India in 1990 about the running club he had just started. But it is one of those small things that documents who he was. He was the kind of man whose new venture, three months in, was already worth a magazine feature. He was the kind of man who founded things that other people then wrote about.

What it became

Thirty-five years later, the Hyderabad Hash still meets almost every Sunday. It has had a long line of Grandmasters since Eric — the honorific changes hands roughly once a year, in keeping with the Hash tradition that no single hasher should ever take themselves too seriously for too long. The kennel honors Eric with the title of GM Emeritus, Grandmaster Emeritus, a permanent recognition reserved for the founder.

Twelve years after he founded it, the kennel he had started in Hyderabad would, with him as Chairman, host the World Interhash in Goa in 2002 — the first time the biennial gathering of Hashers from kennels around the globe had been held in India. That story belongs to its own post. But it would not have happened without H3. The Indian Hash community that hosted the world in 2002 was the community Eric and his early counterparts in Bangalore and Madras had seeded twelve years earlier, and that had grown, in the meantime, into something with international standing.

To the men and women who run with the Hyderabad Hash today — to my friends, the people I see almost every Sunday — Eric is not the communications head at ICRISAT, or the rower at MBC, or the diver in the South China Sea, or the Warden for the United States. He is not even, really, my father. He is simply Digit. The hashname his Manila kennel gave him in the 1980s, the name that traveled with him to India, the name that is on the GM Emeritus plaque, the name that the people who chase trails through the rocks around our city still say at the start of every circle when they invoke the founders.

On, on.

Sources

"Running with the hares," Business India magazine, p. 43 (c. 1990). Hyderabad Hash House Harriers — hyderabadhash.com. Hash House Harriers — Wikipedia.