Last night I was watching a table tennis match between Ma Long and Fan Zhendong where the quality of TT was the best I’ve ever seen, and the match was ridiculously close. I stopped midway because I suddenly felt a weird sadness. These guys were playing live just 6–7 years back, and I couldn’t watch them play live. I wasn’t there to sense the unpredictability and enjoy the obsession when I really could.
Now that I think about it, I really love the sport, and I’ve not done enough justice to it, whereas it has given me a lot.
Discovering the sport
Back in school, when I didn’t even know this game existed in its full glory outside the few mediocre snippets I’d seen in movies, I ran into someone (K) who used to be in the school team and would go for coaching in the evenings. His uncle used to be the first seed in my city, and this dude had TT in his upbringing. He would keep telling me about district and state matches, different players from other schools who used to beat him. All of this felt like a new world out there.
The way he played, the new strokes, the spinning and turning of the ball, all of it felt extremely fascinating. I wanted to see this new world. I started playing with him in every sports class. He would teach me the right strokes. I would try to imitate him, but always lose to him, obviously.
Then the competitive spirit of the game made me join coaching too. Somewhere around 12 years old, I joined a club nearby where they trained. I used to cycle 4 km (trust me), play TT, and cycle back. Studies had gone down the drain at that time because TT was the main focus of my life.
In six months, I learned new strokes and new services. My topspin got good, and I felt like I was better than most players around me. Suddenly I was beating almost everybody in school, and I’d started building a brand of “this guy plays well.” I absolutely loved that validation.
Next year I was included in the school team, where I went ahead and got embarrassed for the first time. Looking at my opponent play the previous match, it felt like I would crush him easily. But when my match started, it felt like I didn’t know the game at all. I still remember my heart racing, butterflies in my stomach, feeling like my limbs weren’t in my control. I had never felt the pressure of representing the school in a sport before. During the match, everybody was watching me play, people were counting on me. I had not felt the seriousness of the sport until then.
Obviously, I lost.
I thought I was a performer. How could I get scared of an opponent? How could I not even receive a simple service? These things really hurt when you’re hitting puberty.
I was playing with the most basic racquet ever, a GKI KungFu, and I thought I needed a good racquet to perform better. I remember asking my parents that I needed a Mark V, an elite rubber that all the great players used in those days, and they were shocked. My parents didn’t understand the gravity of the game. Dad clearly refused, saying it’s always about the player, not the racquet. Mom also said no. I don’t blame them. We were a middle class family, and spending 4000 rupees on a table tennis setup was a big deal in 2007.
Mom refused for about a month, but I remember insisting, pestering, and crying about it. Sweetheart that she is, she promised to save a bit more that month and get it for me in two months.
In two months, I had a brand new racquet. A Mark V rubber on my forehand, a Friendship 729 on a Stiga Offensive Classic ply. I had no excuses anymore. I trained super hard, got a hang of the racquet, and developed a very aggressive game over the next few months.
Eventually, I learned to handle pressure. We started winning district matches and reached the state level, where we all crumbled. I was from Aurangabad, and I could see that teams from Mumbai and Pune were unfathomably better. These guys would go on to represent Maharashtra in nationals, and they were clearly a league apart. But it felt inspiring. I could see the nuance and perfection they had, and how much more there was to the game than what we were playing.
Just when I had started getting exposure to real table tennis, I was in 10th grade. Studies suddenly took priority, and I had to stop playing. I helped my team win the inter house tournament in school, and my parents confiscated my racquet. I had to stop.
College – ego and priorities
Two years later, I went to IIT Madras for higher education and was immediately selected for the TT NSO. I had a great mentor there named Tantrik, who had played at the national level. Playing with him and learning from him was an absolute privilege. In the first year, he helped me take my game to the next level.
The great part was that there were many elite players in IIT, and playing was super fun but also frustrating. These guys had represented their cities and states and had been trained rigorously. In my first year, I was in my hostel team. We reached the finals and lost. It was super fun, somewhat disappointing, but I didn’t feel very sad because the opponents were clearly better.
In my second year, I represented the institute in the inter college games within Chennai, where all the top players of the city would come and participate. We lost quite badly. I started feeling that I wasn’t good enough. But the young 19 year old mind made up excuses, saying I don’t enjoy this game anymore, it’s not cool, I’m meant to do better things, etc.
Finally, I stopped playing seriously. I would keep playing inter hostel matches, but outside that, I stopped training and competing. That was probably the end of me playing competitive TT.
After I joined Hasura, we used to play TT in the office and it was fun. I had one person who gave good competition early on, and I’d lose to him sometimes. Later, COVID hit and we stopped playing entirely. We played occasionally after that, but I didn’t enjoy it much because it was very easy and boring to play against untrained people who didn’t know the basic strokes. Playing at parties, during vacations in hotels, at offices, I would just play a match, dominate for show off, and then move away.
Rediscovery
About six months back, some friends were playing TT and I joined them just to hang out. When I picked up the racquet, I thought this was going to be boring again. But I was feeling adventurous and cocky at that moment, so I thought, let me toy with these guys using the penhold grip.
I used penhold and, guess what, I lost to someone who’s very average at the game.
It felt like a completely different sport again. What do I do when the ball comes fast to the backhand? Do I not use the backhand at all? Do I make this awkward wrist action? It felt weird, but suddenly it was a struggle to win.
Competitive freak that I am, I went back home and looked up how people play with the penhold grip. That’s when I found this player called Xu Xin, who is an absolute artist with penhold. I binged Xu Xin for two hours. Now that I had a more mature mind, I started noticing subtleties and got obsessed again. I went back to the table and started trying some of the strokes.
The next day I went to play with the boys to try out the new things I’d learned, and TT felt like an entirely new game with penhold. We started playing almost regularly. I didn’t even use the backhand for the first two months. I would just use footwork to attack with my forehand all the time and chop with my forehand to defend. It was a real struggle. A steep learning curve. Losing against casual players. Receiving spin serves was a pain because the wrist dynamics and reflexes were completely new.
In two months, playing with my friends and occasionally at clubs on weekends, I got my basics sorted. As of now, I’m one week out from my first ever tournament with penhold. I can’t explain the excitement and adrenaline I feel. I can’t train properly because I don’t have the time to travel to good clubs. Work has taken much higher priority. I train with my friends here, who have also improved significantly over the past six months.
On the back of this, I plan to win the tournament. Fingers crossed.
Some regrets
As much as I’m looking forward to the tournament, I feel I could have done a lot more for TT than I have. I gave up on the game out of ego and laziness. Now that I’m 32, I’m realizing that I absolutely love the game, but I don’t have the time or the fitness to play competitively at a serious level. Still, I’ve been putting in active effort to get better and to appreciate every detail of the sport.
The nuance. The millisecond reaction time. Footwork. Intensity. Topspin and sidespin mixups. Inventing deceptive serves. Learning to snake the ball. Chop blocks. Yelling “cho.”
I keep getting fired up watching pro table tennis lately, and as much as I enjoy it, it’s a bittersweet feeling. Watching those old rallies, I feel the pull of something I once had in full force and then walked away from. Maybe that’s why I paused the match last night. Not because of sadness alone, but because somewhere in those rallies, I could see a younger version of myself chasing a spinning ball like it was the only thing that mattered.