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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Prakash Nanjappa: mental gymnastics
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Prakash Nanjappa: mental gymnastics

How Prakash Nanjappa gave up the life of a software engineer to become one of India's top shooters

Prakash Nanjappa was in New Delhi for a shooting camp ahead of the Asian Games. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/MintPremium
Prakash Nanjappa was in New Delhi for a shooting camp ahead of the Asian Games. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/Mint

Stray thoughts came and went. Prakash Nanjappa didn’t pay any heed. Just like he had practised, he let the thoughts wash over him. Until two relatively new ideas got stuck like paper jammed in a printer.

Dangerous ideas. Nanjappa was standing in his lane at the 2013 International Sports Shooting Federation (ISSF) World Cup in Changwon, South Korea, in the final of the 10m air pistol competition. It was only the 38-year-old’s third international competition and he was in the final. Not just that, he had now survived five elimination rounds—eight shooters qualify for the final, and are eliminated one by one till only three remain—and was assured a medal.

That’s when the thoughts ricocheted through Nanjappa’s head—“I could win gold today." And, “It’s down to the three of us—there’s me, then there’s an Asian Champion, and an Olympic medallist!"

His concentration wavered.

“The medal came in the way," says Nanjappa, in his soft, candid way, sitting in a restaurant at a hotel in New Delhi. “The thoughts climbed. The shots went down 6 o’clock. Both the shots. Same spot."

He ended up with the bronze, a disappointment for him. But it was also one-half of India’s medal tally of two at the Changwon World Cup—the other medallist at the contest was Rahi Sarnobat, who won gold in the 25m air pistol women event.

Nanjappa calls thoughts like these “loopholes". He’s been at work plugging them going into the 17th Asian Games at Incheon, South Korea, which started on Friday. The newest entrant in India’s stellar shooting team is also among its oldest. No one on the 43-member team has come to the sport as late as Nanjappa.

The first time Nanjappa held a pistol, it was a .33mm that could kill a man. He was 12, and the gun was issued to his father, P.N. Papanna, who was then a government official in the excise department in Karnataka and would often go on midnight raids. The incident soon got buried in the humdrum of his father’s job transfers and school changes every three years—nine schools across Bangalore, Mysore, Shimoga and Hassan by the time he got to class X. Because he loved to play, he would pick up any sport that his newest school had to offer. A stark contrast to most of his colleagues on the Asian Games team, who picked up guns in their early teens (some even earlier) and stuck to it. Instead, Nanjappa was captain of a school cricket team once, and played badminton at the national level till a ligament tear in the ankle made it impossible for him to continue. Then, he took a shine to another high-adrenalin sport—motorcycle rallies.

It wasn’t Nanjappa who first got into shooting, it was his father Papanna. At the age of 51, in 1999, Papanna decided that he wanted to learn how to shoot well with his .33, and then found himself preparing for a state-level shooting competition in the Rifle Prone category.

Nanjappa found the whole thing amusing—he joked that his father was “sleeping and shooting". Papanna came back with a rejoinder—“Let’s see if you can do it then?" Nanjappa took the challenge with just three days left till the contest. He won the gold.

Spurred on by his father, Nanjappa decided to try shooting more seriously. Between 1999 and 2003, he won at national competitions and invested 3 lakh in three air pistols. But he did not see himself as an athlete. He wanted to be a software engineer, a more well-worn path. In 2004, he joined telecommunications company Bell Canada as a technical analyst and moved to Montreal. Nearly 13,000km from home, Nanjappa thought he had fired his last shot, and was anyway getting too old for the sport. Five years passed. Nanjappa was making good money, but he missed the adrenalin of sports. He also missed his wife, who was working with her family business, a foundation that runs educational institutions in Bangalore, and could not leave India to be with him. Nanjappa’s father too would nudge him over the phone to move back to India, and take up shooting again. Shooting was doing remarkably well in India—in 2008, the marksman Abhinav Bindra became the first Indian to win an individual Olympic gold. Money was pouring into the sport. Indians were setting world record scores, winning at international events.

Papanna, who was still an active shooter at the state and national levels well into his late 50s, would call Nanjappa and say: “Do you get time for shooting?"

“I’d tell him no," Nanjappa says. “He wouldn’t say anything; he’d just put the phone down. Then again two days later he would phone and ask, ‘So, how’s your shooting going?’"

Something just clicked in Nanjappa’s head. In early 2010 he booked a plane ticket back to Bangalore and landed up at the shooting range soon after. Incredibly, he had still not lost his touch. Within months, he had made it through the trials to the national team, but he narrowly missed selection for the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games (CWG).

For three years, he poured himself into the grind of the national circuit, slowly polishing his technique, upgrading his equipment, and relearning the nuances of this subtle sport. By 2012, he was qualifying for international events, though he was not making the finals. The Changwon World Cup medal in April 2013 took him another step up. He started making the finals now, won a silver at the Asian Airgun Championship later that year. Just three years before his first World Cup medal, Nanjappa had no real inkling that he would shift gear completely in his late 30s and make a career out of shooting at the very centre of a 17x17cm target across 10m. That’s like shooting at the full stop at the end of this sentence from a distance of two Mercedes E-Class cars parked back-to-back.

“In shooting, 90% (of the work) is mental; how you control the thoughts," says Nanjappa, now the world No.12 in the 10m air pistol event. Nanjappa is both candid and articulate when describing his practice of transitional meditation, where he allows thoughts to come and go without latching on to any one.

His strategy ahead of the Asian Games is to follow his set practice routine to a T. He shoots over 100 pellets in each training session of 3 hours. Every day he fits two such sessions into his practice schedule, and snatches 20 minutes in the day, no matter where he is, to meditate. In the evening, he speaks to his father about the things that went well at practice, avoiding anything negative in the conversation.

On the two days we meet, he has practised calling the shot and grouping. The first involves choosing a point on the target where you want to aim, and then making it happen. The idea is to get feedback, both from the coach and from your own body that can then help make the minor adjustments that can take your score from a good 9.9 to a perfect 10.9.

Grouping is to help build consistency. So a shooter might select any point on the target, it could even be on the outermost circle, and try to hit it over and over again, explains Nanjappa. “At some point, shooting needs to become sub-conscious. And that comes from practice," he says.

2014 has been a good year too—Nanjappa won a silver at Glasgow, his first major multi-sport event. India had a total haul of 17 medals in shooting at the event, more than in any other sport. The Asian Games will be different though. China and hosts South Korea will be runaway favourites (India won only eight medals at the last edition of the Asian Games in Guangzhou China, with just one gold).

“Bring ‘em on," Nanjappa says.

■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

Stiff upper lip

Nanjappa had just gotten off the flight in Granada, Spain, for an ISSF contest in July 2013. He was travel-weary, and his face felt funny. A woman travelling with the team thought Nanjappa had quite the stylish, lopsided smile. Once in his hotel room, Nanjappa went to bed without changing. The next morning, he found he couldn’t brush his teeth. The right side of his mouth wouldn’t open; and his right eye wouldn’t close until he forced it shut between his index finger and thumb. He went downstairs to ask the Indian officials if he could miss practice for a day, and they bundled him into a car and took him to a hospital.

“I was blissfully unaware of what was happening to me," says Nanjappa.

At the hospital, they found he had Bell’s Palsy, which affects a nerve that controls facial muscles and causes paralysis on one side of the face. He was put on a course of steroids for 12 days.

Bell’s Palsy is usually self-limiting, and most patients recover use of the muscles after the illness has run its course. Nanjappa’s upper lip is still a little stiff on the right side.

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Published: 20 Sep 2014, 12:03 AM IST
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