Charting out the journey of Mehuli Ghosh

At the 10th Asian Airgun Championships held in Wako City, Japan, Mehuli Ghosh along with Samiksha Dhingra reinstated the strength of women’s shooting in the country as they won the youth and junior air rifle gold medals respectively at the championships. The Gold medal earned Mehuli Ghosh, a Mallcom athlete, a quota spot for the 2018 Youth Olympics. This mind blowing shooter hails from Baidyabati, a small city in the Hooghly district of West Bengal, India. She is mentored and coached by the former Indian Olympiad, Joydeep Karmarkar at the Joydeep Karmarkar Shooting Academy in Kolkata. She has been taking her mentor on a continuous stretch of proud moments ever since she started taking a serious stroll on the shooting palate. She became the new kid on the block in the year 2016, as she bagged two gold and seven silver medals at the 60th National Shooting Championship held in Pune. Then, she went on to continue taking the successful strides by topping in all the categories(Youth, Junior, and Senior) that she took part in during the National trials held at Pune in the same year. At the Preparatory Junior Shooting Championship held in the

Czech Republic in 2017, she finished at seventh position and finished at the seventeenth position at the Junior World Shooting Championship held in Germany. Mehuli’s dedication towards her passion sport is well evident from the fact that she travels up and down for around four hours for her training back packed with her heavy shooting equipment. It’s said that if there’s a will, there’s a way. This young girl’s will is deep desired and unshakably strong. Joydeep, her mentor and coach, once said, ‘Mehuli is lucky to have such parents who despite not being very financially well off, have left no stone unturned for providing relentless support to their daughter’ He further said, ‘Mehuli trains for 2-3 hours every day for four days a week. She is very calm and focussed but her killer instinct comes out if the situation demands’ Shooter Ghosh is definitely going places; making her mentor extremely proud, her parents proud, a nation and its people awed by her skills and audacity, and the world has already started looking up at her as a shooting star. Her Silver at the Youth Olympics comes at the back off yet another brilliant silver at the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games. What makes her future truly exciting is that the policies governing the National Rifle Association of India have now started paying special attention towards honing young stars. With the chance to win an Olympic spot in the Tokyo 2020 Games coming across in 2019, Mehuli has ensured sufficient exposure in the senior circuit till the time actually comes and, who knows, maybe an Olympic spot awaits this girl at so tender an age.