M Raghu secured the title in Mens Singles at the Senior Nationals Badminton. (BAI)
At 9, Raghu Mariswamy couldn’t stop jabbering to his bemused father about how ‘easy’ badminton looked. At 16, he stopped training altogether, forced to study for medical entrance exams. At 19, he completely stopped talking to his family, because they had barred him from playing badminton. And now at 26, when he reached the Senior National final, he called home to try to stop his family in Karnataka’s Mandya from coming over and watching him play at Bangalore’s KBA courts.
“I asked them not to come, but they secretly came and sat hidden. After winning, I saw my father talking happily to newspapers, asking sponsors to help me. So I guess he must be happy,” chuckles the newly crowned national men’s singles champion.
Brash when he talks, bold in his strokemaking, and with a self-confessed blind faith and brooding love for badminton, Raghu completed one of the most rebellious and defiant journeys on the domestic circuit – curing his old man’s pessimism about a sport the latter himself once loved but had spurned due to responsibilities.
Raghu defeated Mithun Manjunath – who was his first doubles partner alongside whom he had won his first Under 10 title – 14-21, 21-14, 24-22 in the final. But well before he parried off three match points from Mithun in the win, Raghu had gotten embroiled in his first ‘badminton argument’ with his father. The son, father and the sport all loved each other, but were never on the same page.
“At 9, I accompanied my father to his playing club in Mandya, stood on the side and kept saying, badminton is so easy, just stand and hit, what was the big deal? He challenged me to start playing, and after running about I had to admit ‘Oh, sh*t, this is too tough’,” Raghu said.
A junior coach’s words stuck in his mind – “There are thousands of engineers and doctors in India, but only one National champion,” he recalls. When Raghu plunged dedicatedly into the sport, his parents however pulled the plug and insisted he study. “My father played state level, but he got weighed down by family responsibilities. An electrical engineer, he told me there was no financial safety in badminton. I continued because it gave me something to look forward to, kept me away from toxicity and drinking, and brought discipline. I loved the sport.”
The “study Science” diktat boomed from home.
Packed off to Mysore from Mandya, he would hunker down for academics, but stew each day, studying physics, chemistry, math, and bio. “I found studies a waste of time. I wasn’t looking forward to it, unlike badminton. I stopped training and lost to a player I had no business losing to, at a district meet. That’s it. That loss gave me the courage to stand up to my parents. They had told me they wouldn’t support me financially. Dad said India was no country for badminton, and I should stop,” he remembers.
In 2017, Raghu was dismayed by what he noticed around him. “Srikanth won so many international titles, but even big players weren’t as famous as they should’ve been. My badminton friends in Denmark had sponsorships from BMW, when there were at least 30 of us in India much better than them. It wasn’t easy to keep belief. I don’t know the reason why I rebelled. Just blind faith maybe,” he says.
A fan of Taufik Hidayat, and Japanese Kenichi Tago, who made All England finals and disappeared soon after, Raghu quit Mysore and took off to Bangalore and resumed training there, refusing to speak to his folks. “Kenichi Tago just played because he loved to…
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