Color of Hockey: India Hockey 360 Festival helps extend game's reach

William Douglas has been writing The Color of Hockey blog since 2012. Douglas joined NHL.com in 2019 and writes about people of color in the sport. Today, he profiles Harry Mahesh, an assistant for Abbotsford, the Vancouver Canucks’ American Hockey League affiliate, and Canucks radio analyst Randip Janda headlining the inaugural India Hockey 360 Festival in Chandigarh, India, which was held July 31-Aug. 2.

For Harry Mahesh, the journey combined all his worlds.

The assistant with Abbotsford, the Vancouver Canucks American Hockey League affiliate, visited his parent’s homeland in India for the first time last month to help promote ice hockey in a cricket-obsessed country of nearly 1.5 billion people.

“It was kind of a well-rounded trip where I finally got to appreciate where my parents grew up and came from," Mahesh said, "and then, at the same time, I got to go there with hockey, which is what I grew up with here in Canada, which was the best of all worlds.”

Mahesh and Randip Janda, the Canucks radio analyst, headlined the inaugural India Hockey 360 Festival from July 31-Aug 2 in Chandigarh. The northern India city, located a little more than four hours north of New Delhi, is the shared capital of the states of Punjab and Haryana and a region where most of the country’s immigrants to Canada hail from.

The three-day festival featured a try hockey session, a coaches’ summit and roller hockey session.

It was organized by Janda and Tulsea Sports Marketing with support from the NHL, Canucks, Anaheim Ducks, Toronto Maple Leafs, Bauer Hockey, the Ice Hockey Association of India and others.

“The main purpose was to meet the hockey community in India and Punjab specifically, where they're at, and provide support on two fronts,” Janda said. “Although there are players in Chandigarh and in Punjab and other parts of India, it's still a sport that has a lot of room to grow within India. 

"So it was a two-pronged approach to provide support for the players and coaches but also to raise the profile of hockey, get hockey sticks in the hands of kids and adults, and allow them to understand what the game is and provide that entry point for them into the game.”

The entry point for many was a large try hockey display set up on Aug. 1 at Nexus Elante, a giant mall in Chandigarh, where folks were invited to grab a stick and take a shot on goal.

“We had 800 people take shots that day, and that's not taking into consideration the people that were just watching on the various levels of the mall, seeing this game maybe for the very first time,” said Janda, the former host of “Hockey Night in Canada: Punjabi Edition.” 

“We had kids, 2-3 years old, trying to take a shot all the way to a 76-year-old woman who was there with her grandson and wanted to take a shot because she was intrigued by what was going on.”

Mahesh was the featured guest at the coaches’ summit and roller hockey clinic on Aug. 3 at Sector 10 Rink, a roller facility in Chandigarh.

“There were about 15-16 coaches, which isn’t a big number, but bigger than I thought for a country that only has (three) indoor ice rinks,” Mahesh said. “It was kind of nice to see that some of the players, knowing that their runway as players is kind of shortening, already have the mindset of, ‘We want to coach next’ and want to pursue the coaching side.”

Harjinder Singh, the Ice Hockey Association of India’s secretary general, said many of the country’s players and coaches look up to Mahesh for his accomplishments.

Born and raised in British Columbia, Mahesh grew up playing ice hockey and rose to the North American minor pro level before entering the coaching ranks after the 2015-16 season.

He coached in the Alberta Minor Midget Hockey League, Manitoba Junior Hockey League, British Columbia Hockey League and girls' hockey in the Canadian School Hockey League.

Mahesh became the first general manager of South Asian descent in Canadian Junior A hockey when he was hired as GM and coach of Winnipeg of the MJHL in 2021.

He was an assistant on the AHL Abbottsford team that won the 2025 Calder Cup under Manny Malhotra, who became the Vancouver Canucks’ coach on June 2 and is the NHL’s first head coach of South Asian descent.

In addition to Malhotra and Mahesh, Abbotsford's championship team included forwards Arshdeep Bains and Jujhar Khaira, whose families also have Punjabi roots.

“Harry becomes an inspiration for (players in India) because they identify with him," Singh said. "They take him as an ambassador for the NHL.”

Singh said he fondly remembers when Mahesh, for one game, represented India. He and his younger brother, Gary, played with India’s men’s national team to help round out its roster for an exhibition game against Brampton, a now-defunct ECHL franchise, in Brampton, Ontario on Oct. 9, 2015.

“So I was very happy to have Harry come over here,” Singh said.

The India Hockey 360 festival was North American hockey’s latest collaboration with the world’s most populous country that has 2,554 men’s and women’s players, according to International Ice Hockey Federation figures.

Six-time Canada women's Olympian Hayley Wickenheiser and retired NHL defenseman Andrew Ference traveled to Ladakh, India, 12,000 feet above sea level in the Himalayas, with a group in January 2018 to help showcase the sport.

They came with 70 full sets of equipment through the NHL Players’ Association’s Goals & Dreams, which supports grassroots hockey programs by providing complete sets of new equipment to deserving youth.

At Wickenheiser’s invitation, members of India’s first women’s national ice hockey team traveled to Canada in November 2018 and to participate in her Wickenheiser Female World Hockey Festival in Airdrie, Alberta.

The festival took place at a time when the country hopes to raise its hockey profile internationally. India has been an IIHF member since April 27, 1989, but its men’s and women’s national teams aren’t currently ranked.

Their men’s, women’s and Under-20 boys teams will compete in IIHF world championship tournaments for the first time starting in 2027 in the hockey governing body’s IV Division. 

“With Randip and Harry coming in, now I have that vision of engaging with them and getting some kind of coaching experts coming to India for this,” Singh said.  “Even if, say, Harry comes in for a month and we do a camp, what I told him, ‘You shouldn’t come to Chandigarh. You should be going straight to the rink from the airport.”