Every two years, the Hash House Harriers — the global community of running clubs that began in Kuala Lumpur in 1938 and now numbers thousands of kennels on every continent — hold a gathering called Interhash. Hashers from around the world fly to a single host city for a long weekend of trails, parties, ceremonies, and the kind of collective good behavior that the Hash community has elevated to an art form. The host city is chosen by vote at the previous Interhash, two years in advance. Hosting Interhash is, for the kennel that wins the bid, an enormous undertaking and an enormous honor.

In 2002, for the first time, India hosted Interhash. The 13th World Interhash was held in Goa. The slogan was It's a Goa! The organizing committee called itself, in keeping with Hash tradition, the Interhash Goa 2002 Mismanagement Committee. The Chairman was my father, Eric McGaw.

How a kennel ends up hosting the world

To understand what it meant for India to host Interhash in 2002, you have to understand the size of the Hash world Eric had been building toward.

In March 1990, twelve years earlier, Eric had founded the Hyderabad Hash House Harriers — H3 — alongside sister chapters being founded in Bangalore and Madras. By the end of its first year, the Hyderabad Hash had thirty-five members, half of them local Indian executives. That same year, Business India magazine was reporting on the new kennels and quoting him about the strange sight of a hundred-odd executives running through Indian city streets shouting on, on.

Through the 1990s the Indian Hash community grew. New kennels appeared in Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta, Pune, Goa itself. The kennels Eric and his counterparts had seeded in 1990 became the backbone of an Indian Hash circuit, with regional events drawing hundreds of runners across the subcontinent. By the late 1990s, the Indian Hashes were sufficiently established to bid for Interhash. The bid was successful: at Interhash 2000 in Hobart, Tasmania, the assembled hashers voted for Goa to host the next event.

Goa, of course, was not Hyderabad. The Indian Hash community knew that the host city for an international gathering had to be Goa: the beaches, the climate, the visa logistics, the existing tourism infrastructure, the absence of dry-state alcohol restrictions. But the kennels that had built the bid, that had organized the logistics, that ran the Mismanagement Committee — those were the kennels Eric had helped seed in 1990. The man who had laid the first trail in Hyderabad twelve years earlier was now Chairman of the committee bringing two thousand hashers from kennels around the world to Indian soil.

It's a Goa!

The slogan was a pun. Goa, the Indian state. Go-a, the verb. It's a goer. It's a go. It worked in every language at the gathering, which is the hallmark of a Hash slogan that is going to stick. The merchandise was extensive — patches, t-shirts, mugs, hats, the Mismanagement Committee's official booklet. Vintage Interhash Goa 2002 patches still trade on Hash collector sites today, more than two decades later. The 2002 Interhash booklet, published by the Mismanagement Committee in September of that year, is now a rare book — listed by collectors as a paperback first edition with a clean cover.

Hashers came from kennels around the globe. Oslo Hash House Harriers, in Norway, scheduled their participation as Run Number 666 of their kennel — a number they noted with hash-typical glee. Hashes from Hong Kong, Singapore, Manila, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Dubai, Nairobi, London, Cardiff, Sydney, Wellington, Cape Town, San Francisco, and dozens of other cities sent contingents. The trails ran through the Goan countryside, along the beaches, through the Portuguese-colonial backstreets of Panjim and Old Goa. The circles ran late into the night.

The Kingfisher cans

There is a detail about Interhash Goa 2002 that almost nobody else will ever record, which is why I want to put it on the internet now: the beer cans.

Kingfisher — the Indian beer brand owned by United Breweries Group, a fixture of every bar and bottle shop in the country since the late 1970s — had been a longtime sponsor of Indian Hash events. For Interhash Goa 2002, Kingfisher did something they had never done before. They customized their cans. The Interhash 2002 logo was printed directly on Kingfisher's standard 500ml lager cans, marked with the It's a Goa! slogan, distributed exclusively at the event.

This was the first time, ever, that Kingfisher had printed an event-specific can in India. To pull off the production run, Kingfisher had the cans manufactured in Germany — the Indian printing capacity at the time couldn't handle the customization to Kingfisher's quality standards — and shipped them back to Goa for distribution. A beer brand that had spent two decades selling unbranded promotional pours at Indian sporting events broke its own design rules for one Hash gathering, in a Portuguese-colonial state on the west coast of India, organized by a committee chaired by my father.

The Economic Times of India covered it. The story ran under the headline "Beers, it's party time in Goa," and it remains one of the only mainstream Indian press records of the event. The article placed the Kingfisher customization in context: Indian sporting events at the time were not known for high-touch corporate sponsorship, and a custom-printed beer can was unusual enough to merit business-press coverage.

Our family kept one of the cans. It is, I am told, somewhere in our archives. It is not empty. It has been unopened for twenty-three years. It is, in its way, one of the most specific physical artifacts of my father's life — a tin cylinder, manufactured in Germany, printed with the logo of a Hash gathering held in a Portuguese-Indian beach state, kept on a shelf because it was a souvenir of an event he had organized. The kind of object that exists because someone, on a Sunday morning twenty-three years ago, took home rather than throwing it in the bin.

What hosting the world meant

Interhash Goa 2002 was a substantial international event. By the standards of the global Hash community, it was a benchmark — well-organized, well-attended, well-loved. The Mismanagement Committee did what Mismanagement Committees are supposed to do, which is to run things that look chaotic and feel chaotic and are, in fact, ruthlessly competent underneath. Hashers from all over the world flew home with patches and stories and minor injuries and the conviction that they would, definitely, be back for the next one.

But what it meant for the Indian Hash community — for the Hyderabad and Bangalore and Madras kennels that Eric and his counterparts had founded twelve years earlier — was something else. It meant that the small expatriate-and-Indian running clubs that had laid their first trails in 1990 had grown into a community substantial enough to host the world. The country my father had brought Hashing to in March 1990 was, in September 2002, welcoming the global Hash family home.

The closing ceremony, by all accounts, was a celebration of that arc. Twelve years from a 35-member kennel in Hyderabad to two thousand hashers gathered on a Goan beach. From flour trails through the rocky landscape outside Patancheru to the international Hash community's permanent record. From founder of one Indian Hash to Chairman of the world.

Eric received a great deal of recognition for the event. Hashers gave speeches; the Mismanagement Committee was toasted; the event poured itself out, as Hash events always do, into a long final circle that no one quite remembers the end of. He went home to Hyderabad, eventually, with whatever the Mismanagement Committee chairmen go home with — a lot of memories, a lot of mild headaches, a complete sense of having pulled off something nobody quite believed could be pulled off.

And one customized Kingfisher can, kept by his family, on a shelf, for the next twenty-three years.

On, on.

Sources

"Beers, it's party time in Goa," The Economic Times — economictimes.indiatimes.com. Interhash Goa 2002: It's a Goa! (13th World Interhash), published by the Interhash Goa 2002 Mismanagement Committee, September 2002. Hash House Harriers — Wikipedia.