Today, we have forgotten all those troubles. We took enough care of his health too. He used to exercise, do yoga and eat lots of protein and green vegetables. He is a diet freak and avoids greasy food. He loves tandoori chicken, but he keeps controls over his intake. He is not a demanding person at the dining table. He has changed our lives because he eats his dinner at 8 pm. He goes to bed early and gets up at 6 am to practice. After lunch and a little rest he swims sometimes, sometimes he gets a massage. He likes to finish his day by 5 pm.
Our family has a tendency to put on weight, but Abhinav maintains his weight with a rigorous exercise and yoga schedule.
Abhinav used to attend shooting camps at the cost of school. He would find that the shooting ranges at the camps were not functional. He wasted so much time that we decided to install a shooting range on our farm. Abhinav has electronics targets at our shooting range, like he does at the Olmpics. In our country we have paper targets because sometimes we don't have electricity and sometimes the electronic targets do not function well.
'What's the incentive to be a sportsman in India?'
He wears Swedish-made jackets and trousers made of a mixture of leather and canvas. He also wears special shoes. Everything he wears give him stability. His clothes weigh 7 to 8 kilos. He wears a body suit inside the jackets. He uses a German-made Walter L G 300 XT gun, which weighs more than 5 kilos.
Initially, I requested my sister Tina Chopra, who lives in America, to buy a rifle for Abhinav. I am so happy that my sister brought his first good air gun. He wears a light cap to keep the sunlight away from his eyes. He has a power of 2 to 2.25 in his eyes so he wears shooting glasses. While shooting shooters have to keep one eye closed. They wear special spectacles with one little glass through which they aim at the target.
He doesn't have any superstition. Before beginning his game he doesn't do or say anything. When his competition was on at the Olympics in Sydney and Athens, I crossed my fingers and chanted Satnam Wahe Guru.
We could not go to Beijing because we could not get accommodation. We searched the Internet and could find a decent hotel only 300 kilometres away. We requested the IOA (Indian Olympic Association), but somehow we could not make proper arrangements. I wanted to hug my son first when he won the medal.
Every time he leaves home for a competition, I always request him, "Abhinav Gurdware main matha tek ke jao (pray at the gurdwara). He does it. We follow Sikhism, but we respect all religions.
Image: Abhinav Bindra during the the Men's 10m Air Rifle competition in Beijing. Photograph: Valery Hache/AFP/Getty Images
Also read: 'Somehow the Flying Sikh has endured in people's memory'
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