It is no coincidence that in three consecutive Olympics till now, the first medal for India has come from its women. In Rio, it was Sakshi Malik, while in Tokyo, it was Mirabai Chanu, and now in Paris, it has been Manu Bhaker. This is a testimony to the rising power of women in today’s India.

Born on 18th February 2002 at Jhajjar in Haryana, pistol-firing was not on young Manu’s list of sports. Haryana is better known for churning out boxers and wrestlers, and so without a doubt, boxing was one of the sports on Manu’s list along with tennis and skating. In fact, seeing the Manu Bhaker of today with her infectious sweet smile, one would scarcely believe that at one time she won a medal at the national level in a particular form of martial art. However, once she tried her hand at shooting at the age of 14 years, and much to India’s good fortune, shooting became teenager Manu’s first love and it has continued till date.

Shooting is among the oldest events that were included in the Olympics as it was introduced at the very first modern Summer Olympics at Athens in 1896. Since then, shooting events have been contested in three categories – the pistol, rifle and shotgun. The U.S. has the history of being the most successful country in shooting so far, with more than 100 Olympic medals, while India, before the Paris 2024 version, had just four. Major Rajvardhan Rathore opened the account with a silver in the Men’s Double Trap at Athens in 2004. In 2008, at Bejing, Abhinav Bindra excelled in the 10 metre rifle event with a gold and then four years later, at London, Gagan Narang won a bronze in the 10 metre rifle event, while Vijay Kumar achieved the same in the 25 metre rapid air pistol event.

Get the digital edition of the September 2024 issue to read the full article.

The post Well Done, Manu Bhaker! appeared first on The Teenager Today.

By the end of June 2024, two wonderful things happened in Indian cricket. While most of us rejoiced at our men’s team winning the ICC T20 World Cup, the achievement eclipsed the achievements of our women’s cricket team which was simultaneously making the South African team bite the dust.

Let it be ‘ladies first’ for this article, and more so because many of us may not have followed the remarkable performances of Harmanpreet Kaur and company. Smriti Mandhana was undoubtedly the player of the One Day International three-match series. She scored back to back centuries in the first two ODIs and missed the same by just ten runs in the third outing. While the second ODI finished as a close one despite the Indian team having set up a mountain target of 326 runs for a South African victory, the first and third ODIs failed to see any South African challenge worth the name.

Moving from white ball to white dress cricket, the Indian team was once again on top with the opening pair of Shefali Varma and Smriti putting up a record 292 runs for the opening stand. In the process, the Indian team declared the innings at 603 for 6 wicket; the highest ever total accumulated in any women’s Test match. While Shefali scored a double hundred, Smriti scored a century, once again. However, when the Indian team won the Test by 10 wickets, it was spin bowler, Sneh Rana, who was adjudged as the Player of the Match for bagging 10 wickets. She is only the second Indian player after Jhulam Goswami to have bagged 10 wickets in a Test match.

In men’s cricket the scene was very different. It seemed more than once that the Indian team would lose its T20 encounter. The first such occasion seemed to be against Pakistan but some immaculate bowling by our bowlers coupled with some rash attitude of the Pakistani batters end up with an Indian victory. The danger appeared to be the same even in the title contest against South Africa when the opponents required just 30 runs off 30 deliveries, but just one over from Jasprit Bumrah, a great catch by Suryakumar Yadav despite being under tremendous pressure, followed by a miserly penultimate over of just four runs by Arshdeep, turned the probable result of the match upside down in India’s favour.

Subscribe to The Teenager Today print / digital editions to read the full article.

The post We did it! The T20 World Cup and More appeared first on The Teenager Today.

During our younger days some of the quiz questions ran thus: Who has won the Formula 1 World Championship twice? or Which mountaineer has scaled Mount Everest twice? The answer to the first question was Ayrton Senna who won the Formula 1 World Championship in 1988 and 1990 and actually went on to win the Championship for the third time in 1991 but met with a fatal crash in 1994. The answer to the second question was Nawang Gombu Sherpa.

The 29,035 feet (8,850 metres), the highest point on planet Earth, was scaled successfully for the first time by Edmund Hillary from New Zealand and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay on 29 May 1953. Nawang Gombu became the youngest Sherpa to reach 26,000 feet and scaled Everest for the first time in 1963 and again two years later.

However, in the field of Formula 1 racing, Ayrton Senna’s glorious achievement has been put to shade by racers like Michael Schumaker and Lewis Hamilton. When I attended the Basic Mountaineering Course, way back in November 1981, at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, Darjeeling, Nawang Gombu who was one of our instructors was a hero to be worshipped by every mountaineering enthusiast. However, since then, several sherpas have scaled the world’s highest mountain on more than ten occasions. Leading the pack with 30 successful summits is 54-year-old Kami Rita Sherpa.

Tenzing was born in Thame, a small village in the Solukhumbu district of Nepal. Twenty seven years later, on 17 January, the same village saw the birth of Kami Rita. The young Kami wanted to be a monk but he soon realised that this was not going to be the way of his future life. He became a porter for the mountaineers and thus began his mountaineering career.

Subscribe to The Teenager Today print / digital editions to read the full article.

The post For Kami Rita Sherpa It’s A Walk Up Everest appeared first on The Teenager Today.

Life is not just about talent; circumstances, environment, timing and an umpteen number of other factors are all at work to create heroes for us. Regular readers of The Teenager Today may like to refresh their memories about the August 2018 issue of the magazine which carried an article on our chess prodigy, Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu. At the age of 10 years, 10 months and 11 days, he became the world’s youngest International Chess Master, but in the absence of more tournaments, he had to wait till he was 12 years, 10 months and 13 days to become a Grand Master.

India was blessed with another chess prodigy in Gukesh Dommaraju who, in 2019, at the age of 12 years, 7 months and 17 days, emerged as the world’s second youngest-ever chess Grand Master, falling short by just seventeen days to equal Sergey Karjakin’s record. In 2021, however, Gukesh slipped to third place among the youngest Grand Masters when American chess prodigy Abhimanyu Mishra broke Sergey’s 22-year-old record to become the youngest chess Grand Master at the age of 10 years, 10 months and 11 days; unbelievable but true!

Gukesh, however, holds some world records against his name. Although he is the third youngest to achieve an ELO rating of 2700 (September 2022), he is the youngest ever to reach 2750 (August 2023), and now to top it all, he is the youngest ever to win the FIDE Candidates Tournament and become eligible to compete for the World Chess Championship.

Subscribe to The Teenager Today print / digital editions to read the full article.

The post Enter Another Chess Prodigy: Gukesh Dommaraju appeared first on The Teenager Today.

Fame is the very first part of his name and he has stood by it. Yashasvi Bhupendra Kumar Jaiswal has come to stay in international cricket and it seems to be on his very own terms. The 22-year-old left-hand batter made his Test debut against the West Indies in July 2023 and joined the select band of cricketers who have scored a century on debut. It just wasn’t an ordinary century but one that went well above the 150 mark to finish at 171. In the history of Test cricket, only ten batters have scored more runs in their debut Tests and the two Indians among that list are Shikhar Dhawan and Rohit Sharma.

Knowing that the best place to get the right cricketing impetus at a young age of just twelve years, Yashasvi moved from his village residence of Bhadohi in Uttar Pradesh to Mumbai. Life was tough; there were days when he had to go to sleep hungry but the determination in the young lad decided to overcome it all. He earned a few bucks at times through some part-time business but it was never enough to give a growing boy the nutritious diet required to gain the strength necessary to blossom into a hard-hitting batter.

Yashasvi was fortunate that coach Jwala Singh assessed the potential of the then teenager and took him under his tutelage. Thereafter, there was no looking back for Yashasvi Jaiswal. Yet to achieve his age of majority, Yashasvi scored two hundreds, one double hundred and an unbeaten half century in the Vijay Hazare Trophy.

Subscribe to The Teenager Today print / digital editions to read the full article.

The post The Rise to Fame of Yashasvi Jaiswal appeared first on The Teenager Today.

During our days of primary education, there were no mobile phones and no Google to enhance our worldly knowledge. Our means of gathering knowledge were books, magazines and newspapers. A few of such books that I remember were the Read and Tell series and some eight-page small pamphlet-like books that conveyed several interesting stories. The latter carried mostly character-building stories and the couple of stories that I can still recollect are Rama Cried Wolf and Robert Bruce: The King of Scotland.

Robert Bruce was the King of England who tried to conquer Scotland, but failed six times. After the sixth failure, Robert was hiding in a cave when he saw a spider trying to stretch its web from one end of the cave to the other. The spider failed six times but did not give up its attempt and climbed the wall each time to meet with success on its seventh attempt. Inspired by the small being, Robert the Bruce gathered his army and met with success to become the King of Scotland.

For the present generation, this story of Robert the Bruce may be a new one but then they needn’t get lost in the history of England and Scotland. For the present generation a personality imparting a similar inspiration about not to give up is that of Rohan Machanda Bopanna, an Indian professional tennis player who has etched a new level in tennis doubles which is now being termed as ‘Level 43’.

Born on 4 March 1980 in Bengaluru, Rohan Bopanna turned professional in 2003. His singles achievements are a total contrast to what he has achieved in doubles. In singles, Rohan has never won any ATP or Grand Slam title, while in doubles, with nearly 60% wins he has a total of 25 titles. The highest ever singles ATP ranking that Rohan has ever achieved has been well below 200 while in the doubles he created a furore when in the company of Matthew Ebden, he won the Australian Open doubles title in 2024 and on 29 January 2024 attained the No. 1 ATP ranking in doubles, just 35 days shy of attaining the age of 44 years.

Subscribe to The Teenager Today print / digital editions to read the full article.

The post Rohan Bopanna: No.1 at Level 43 appeared first on The Teenager Today.

In some earlier issues, I had worked out statistically to show why Ravindra Jadeja is India’s best all-rounder of all times. Any cricketer is considered to be an all-rounder if the batting average of the individual, when divided by the bowling average, gives a result of one or more. If Mithali Raj could be considered to be the Sachin Tendulkar of Indian cricket, it would be only proper to call Deepti Sharma as the Ravindra Jadeja of Indian cricket and perhaps a little more.

Born to Bhagwan Sharma and Sushila Sharma in Agra on 24 August 1997, Deepti’s initial inspiration for playing cricket came from her elder brother, Sumit, who was a local pace bowler. Like a few women cricketers in the current Indian cricket team, like Shefali Varma and Smriti Mandhana, Deepti started playing cricket along with the boys of her locality. In fact, when the teenager Deepti caught the eye of Hemlata Kala, a former Indian cricketer and then chairperson of BCCI’s selection committee for women, Kala thought that Deepti was a boy!

Subscribe to The Teenager Today print / digital editions to read the full article.

The post Deepti Sharma: India’s Best Woman All-Rounder appeared first on The Teenager Today.

The year 2008 brought about a big change in my life when I moved from the Indian Air Force to the corporate world. It was a planned move in my career, but something else happened to my lifestyle which I had never planned or anticipated. I had always been notorious for being an early-to-bed person and 10 p.m. had always been the latest cut-off time for my studies even during the most crucial examination times.

The only exception was the period of study at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, where the curriculum and mode of imparting knowledge have to be experienced to be believed; it just does not permit any physical or mental laxity, laziness or luxury. Needless to add, the professors are exceptional as are the case studies that one has to prepare by burning the midnight oil.

Out from the clutches of IIMA, as the General Manager of Forbes & Company Limited, I had every opportunity to revert to my old habits, which they say die hard, but one thing ensured that it was not to be: the start of the Indian Premier League. With the exception of a few matches, almost all matches continued to be decided in the last two overs of the match and starting at 8 p.m. it was not unusual for most of the matches going beyond 11.15 p.m.

Thanks to the organising skill of Lalit Modi, the IPL not only impacted my personal lifestyle but converted not only cricket but the whole sports world into a huge commercial venture which before 2008 was unforeseeable by any stretch of the imagination. Undoubtedly, Indian cricket and Indian cricketers have been the biggest gainers and the gain has not been limited to just commercial gains.

Foreign players and Boards that at one time did not refrain from misbehaving with their Indian counterparts are now judicious enough not to annoy their adversaries lest they are boycotted from participating in cricket’s most lucrative competition. At the same time, the Board of Control for Cricket in India now has a big reservoir to exhume cricketing talent in this country.

Subscribe to The Teenager Today print / digital editions to read the full article.

The post IPL: Hitting New Heights appeared first on The Teenager Today.

“Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned”, goes an age-old English proverb, but time and again this scorn has proved to be of great advantage to our country. Tulsidas is said to have been chastised by his wife all because of his infatuation for his wife, and the ridiculed lover went on to compose the Ram Charit Manas which today governs the life of more than a billion people around the world. Kicked out of the home by his wife Vidyotama for his stupidity and ignorance, Kalidas went on to become the greatest dramatist and writer that India has ever produced.

The story of Mohammed Shami has a close resemblance to that of Tulsidas and Kalidas. Accused by his wife of domestic violence to the extent of him having come close to imprisonment, Shami seems to have come back with a vengeance, and the expression of his anger seems to make the opposition batsmen suffer on the cricket field, much to the delight of all Indian cricket fans.

Born to a farmer’s family on 3 September 1990 in a village in the Uttar Pradesh district of Amroha, Shami’s career has been one of uncertainties and injuries. Paradoxically, it has been injuries to his teammates that have created the vent for Mohammed Shami to come up and prove his worth. In 2012, an injury to one of his teammates created an opportunity for Shami to play for the East Zone in the Duleep Trophy, and with an eight wicket haul, he was instrumental in his team winning the Duleep Trophy.

Having been made to sit out for four matches in the 2023 ICC ODI World Cup despite an impressive performance against the Australians just before that, an injury to Hardik Pandya left the selectors with no alternative but to rework the Indian team’s composition, and in came Shami with a big bang.

Subscribe to The Teenager Today print / digital editions to read the full article.

The post Mohammed Shami: The Sphinx of Indian Cricket appeared first on The Teenager Today.

He was one of India’s spin foursome that took the cricketing world by storm. While Bhagwat Chandrasekhar was a freak, Erapalli Anantrao Prasanna was enticing; Srinivas Vekataraghavan was the supplement to the trio where Bishan Singh Bedi was known for his accuracy.

In his international career spanning 13 years, Bedi played in 67 Tests and led the Indian team in a third of them. Although Bedi started his cricketing career quite late, he finished with 1564 first class wickets which remains an India record. While Bapu Nadkarni holds the world record for bowling 131 balls against England without conceding a run; Bedi’s 16.35 maiden overs per Test is only second best to the West Indian, Lance Gibbs whose record stands at 16.62.

In the inaugural World Cup in 1975, where the matches were of 60 overs each and each bowler could bowl a maximum of 12 overs, Bedi created a record that will perhaps never be equalled. Playing against East Africa, he claimed one wicket at the expense of just six runs as eight of his twelve overs were maiden.

Subscribe to The Teenager Today print / digital editions to read the full article.

The post Bishan Singh Bedi: The Sardar of Spin appeared first on The Teenager Today.