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The champion marksman explains why professionalisation of the sports bodies is key to making India a world-beater Life doesn’t end with retirement, especially if you’re India’s only individual Olympic champion to date. Shooter Abhinav Bindra, world champion in the 10 m Air Rifle event in 2006 and gold medallist at Beijing 2008, almost made it to the medals podium at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games before calling it a day. The five-time Olympian, still a young 34, has now made it his mission to give back to sport, and shooting. Still chairman of the Athletes Commission of the International Shooting Sport Federation (ISSF), he has set up a High Performance Training Centre in Chandigarh and been a part of several committees tasked with making Indian sport more professional and result-oriented. In this wide-ranging interview, Bindra talks about what it is that we really need to put India firmly on the Olympic map. Excerpts: How has life been after the Rio Olympics? I have been occupie...

Despite an abundance of artists in the performing arts space in India, celebrities occupy that slot at international events What have we reduced International Women’s Day to? It’s nothing short of a jamboree. Events aplenty are organised around March 8 to demonstrate our admiration for ‘womanhood’, which clearly most of us don’t seem to understand. Otherwise, how on earth could anybody choose to screen Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill as the most befitting representation, like a performance space in my city did? Art exhibitions are the easiest to organise. Invite seven women artists, hang their paintings on the wall, and bingo! You have a show! So what if the art on display is divergent to the extent of endangering dialogue amongst/with the paintings on display? An obsession with celebrities To add to this, my social media feed went berserk with the news of director, author and now dancer Aishwaryaa R. Dhanush being invited to perform a Bharatanatyam recital at the United Nations o...