Either enforce the cant properly or admit it is decoration

The continuous chant is the one rule that makes kabaddi kabaddi, and officials have quietly stopped policing it.

Listen to a raid on a broadcast feed with the crowd microphone up. You will hear a syllable at the start, another somewhere in the middle, and then a lot of nothing while a young man sprints for the midline with his lungs full. The cant is supposed to be continuous. It is not continuous, and everybody has agreed not to mention it.

This matters more than a purist grumble. The chant exists as a physiological constraint. A raider who must keep vocalising cannot hold his breath, cannot take a fresh one, and therefore cannot stay in the opposition half indefinitely. It is the original clock, older than any thirty second rule, and it enforced itself. Nobody had to make a judgement call. When the raider ran out of air, the raid ended.

Once officials stopped enforcing it strictly, two things followed. Breath holding became a trainable advantage, so raiders now work on breath control the way swimmers do, and the mechanical clock had to be added to do the job the chant used to do on its own. We replaced a self policing rule with a scoreboard and an official watching it.

So here is my objection. A raider being called out for a broken cant is one of the rarest decisions in the sport, and yet if you actually watched with the rule in hand you would call it several times a half. Rules that exist on paper and never in practice corrode everything around them, because players learn where the real line is and it is never where the book says.

Two honest options. Enforce it, accept a messy season of angry raiders and disputed calls, and let the sport look like its own rulebook again. Or delete it, keep the clock, and let the raider run in silence like any other athlete.

I would enforce it, and I know that is the less practical answer. The chant is not costume. It is the mechanism that made a wrestling game into a breathing game, and a kabaddi without it is a very good tag sport with an unusual name.

Pick one. The current arrangement is neither.