For Meena Sharma, mother of world junior badminton silver medallist Tanvi Sharma, the love for a game she played in college, but couldn’t pursue seriously, needed both an outlet and an outcome. So the single mother from Hoshiarpur in Punjab, a physical education teacher, took it upon herself to turn badminton coach for her children, ensuring 16-year-old Tanvi ended up with a podium finish at the World Junior Championships in Guwahati.

It’s for this that, in Punjab, Meena is called the ‘Mahaveer Phogat of badminton’, a reference to the father who defied the odds for his wrestler daughters and whose story inspired the Bollywood hit Dangal.

Family finances were often stretched but the mother somehow ensured that Tanvi and her sister Radhika, a national-level shuttler, continued to play the

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