Passion and pain are more intertwined qualities than is widely realised. Suffering feeds a well-spring of creativity. Great art has too often sprung from extreme deprivation — be it emotional, mental or even physical. Possibly the greatest example of this link between pain and creation was Vincent van Gogh. Countless other examples exist.
For India’s first individual Olympic gold medal winner Abhinav Bindra, there is a close link between his profession, and art. In A Shot at History: My Obsessive Journey to Olympic Gold, his recently released autobiography, co-authored by the stylish and well-regarded sportswriter Rohit Brijnath, Bindra writes: “The shooter in front of his target is akin to an artist contemplating his canvas... Quietness is a virtue, stillness a quality, form is everything. Lost in contemplation before our different pieces of paper, the world drifts into irrelevance. It is the most perfect of private spaces.”
The correlation between canvas and cordite, in fact, runs through this book like a thread, as does the one between misery and motivation, strange as it may seem. In a sense, the Beijing story starts as early as 2004, when Bindra was among the favourites for the 10m air rifle gold, the event in which he was to finally break through and win Olympic glory four years later.
Having qualified for the final, the Chandigarh-born shooter suffered an inexplicable meltdown, finishing seventh in the field of eight finalists. The failure — after years of toil and preparation, and thereafter qualifying — was shattering.
“All my life didn’t matter anymore, because now, on this Athens afternoon, I was nothing, a sporting irrelevance,” he writes. “Only sport can do this to you, strip you naked in an instant in public, step on your dreams, make four years of practice incidental... you can’t even blame anyone, cannot excuse failure as a rival’s inspired play, a referee’s error, a lucky bounce. Only one person is responsible for defeat. You.”
Such is the loneliness and internalised stress a shooter has to deal with, and this book, in some ways, is a map of that tortured journey. At many points in the journey, Bindra faces questions.
Yet every time he stumbled, there was his family — father Apjit, mother Babli and sister Divya — to help him pick up the pieces and steer his steps back on the road he had chosen.
The trauma of Athens became a fresh start point in the quest that had begun at age 10 when he was first allowed to pull the trigger of his father’s shotgun. It was to lead to his finding a guru in Jagir Singh Dhillon, a retired Armyman who would then walk with him deeper — via a trail of broken bottles on the family lawn and “human targets” — into the world of guns that had fascinated Bindra from a much younger age.
As A Shot at History unfolds, it lends a glimpse into an athlete who shut out almost everything else in his life to pursue his goal of success. Blessed with a support group comprising his family, a former tutor, his two coaches and trainer, Bindra channelled his neuroses and insecurities into becoming a stronger competitor. The process was a hard one and talking about it requires guts and real honesty, and Bindra has not flinched from that. Nor from the traumatic, empty aftermath of having achieved his goal.
Nor does he pull his punches in taking on officialdom, which he never had time for. Every encounter with a babu, Bindra recalls, left him either humiliated or seething. “The tone is patronising, the manner feudal, the atmosphere unwelcoming. I am their job, but I flee like their burden. These are bookkeepers, who look like they feel a physical pain in parting with money that is not really theirs, who have little understanding of sports yet will interrogate you suspiciously... It’s like going through the ABC of sport all over again. It is humiliating, it is tiring.” And he very rightly points out, until the day the babus realise the athletes come first, nothing will change in Indian sport.
A Shot at History is a vivid and compelling peep into the mind of an obsessive perfectionist — maybe the two qualities are intertwined — who treads a hard road one made harder by, indifference, insensitivity and ignorance. In the Singapore-based Brijnath, formerly of Sportsworld and India Today, Bindra has a good partner in putting word to paper.
Having suffered his way to Olympic glory and its aftermath, Bindra is ready to suffer again. Bring on London.