THE SHUTTLE QUEEN

LOVE ALL, PLAY Saina Nehwal, An Inspirational Biography, the first book about the 22-year-old champion, talks about her close ties with her family and coach, looks at what makes her a winner

T here’s something about Saina Nehwal; something wholesome and endearing; something middle class and believable; something solid and dependable. She reminds you of the young Sachin, really, with her absolute focus and quiet charm. And like him, the badminton champ seems marked for greatness and for a place in the perennial sunshine that bathes those anointed by the Indian public as worthy of adoration.
Few sportsmen make the grade. The ones who do are usually expert wielders of cricket bats with squeaky clean lives. Lately, the Indian sporting scene with its doping scandals in athletics, the public wars between tennis ‘stalwarts’, and the twisted tragedy of Pinki Pramanik seems straight out of the script of a lurid soap opera.

Against this blotchy backdrop, 22year-old Saina glides like a pristine bird. Perhaps it’s because of her extreme youth, her no-nonsense air or even her obvious disinterest in appearing vacuously pretty, that this younger daughter of an agricultural scientist and a former state-level badminton player from Haryana hasn’t attracted the kind of intrusive media attention which fellow Hyderabadi, Sania Mirza, has always had to contend with. Of a piece with that, instead of column inches focusing on her love life or her dress sense, Nehwal has an entire biography devoted to her.
Journalist TS Sudhir, formerly of NDTV, whose ‘ Saina Nehwal, An Inspirational Biography’ has just been released, says he chose her as his subject because few people know about the details of her life. “She is extremely focused and very disciplined for a girl her age; she is stubborn and has an obsessive hunger to win,” he says adding that he was also impressed by her relationship with her parents and her coach Pullela Gopichand with whom she, apparently, shares the ideal guru-shishya relationship. Since Saina’s father Dr Harvir Singh is a close friend of the author, the family freely shared intimate anecdotes. So the reader learns that Saina’s mother nursed her until she was four-and-a-half years old and that, as an infant, the future three-time Indonesian Open champion and India’s great Olympic hope often laughed raucously as she watched her mother play badminton. Sudhir reveals that Saina, who was named after Shirdi Sai Baba – her name is a truncation of ‘Sainaam’ – continues to be grounded and humble while also having that winning “maar doonga” attitude.

“She has put a shield around her and is focused on the Olympics now,” Sudhir says adding that Saina currently spends 12 hours daily training at the Pullela Gopichand Badminton Academy in her hometown. That’s the sort of detail that will endear her to a public yearning for a spotless next-generation hero worthy of worship, someone who will decimate everything in her path while staying true to her family and her guru… and oh, also maintaining a certain disdain for frou frou fashion.