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NEW DELHI: Have you ever visited the Instagram profile of late shooting legend Jaspal Rana? If you do, the first thing that catches the eye is the line in his bio. Written in Devanagari, it reads: “Jab mrityu nishchit ho, swayam ko acche kaaran ke liye samarpit karna sarvottam hai.“
Translated into English, it reveals his core philosophy. “When death is inevitable, dedicating oneself to a good cause is the highest course of action.”In the early hours of Friday, Rana, the winner of multiple gold medals across the Asian Games, Commonwealth Games, and Asian Championships, breathed his last just a fortnight before his 50th birthday, leaving behind a world with one less person who truly lived by that creed.Becoming an Arjuna Awardee at 18, Rana would soon transition into a coach and hone world-beaters like Manu Bhaker, Saurabh Chaudhary, and Anish Bhanwala, among others. For his deeds, he was honoured with the Dronacharya Award in 2020, well before one of his proteges, in Bhaker, went on to make history by winning two medals in a single edition of the Olympics.Last year, he took charge as the Indian shooting team’s high-performance coach. And owing to that, he flew to Munich for the ISSF World Cup earlier this summer.Among the women’s 10m air pistol squad was 22-year-old Muskan from Bhiwani, Haryana. Surrounded by established names such as Manu Bhaker, Suruchi Singh, and Esha Singh, a rising shooter could easily have felt overwhelmed. But under Jaspal Rana’s watch, that was never the case.“Just recently, when our kids went to Germany, my daughter Muskan had gone, and Suruchi had gone too,” Suresh Singh, who runs the Guru Dronacharya Shooting Academy in Haryana and serves as Suruchi’s personal coach, told TimesofIndia. com. “So my daughter casually mentioned that, ‘Sir, I don’t have this.’ There was some item she needed, I can’t quite remember what it was. Jaspal sir immediately said, ‘What do you need, beta? I’ll bring it right now.‘ He himself went to a stall, bought it, and handed it to her. When she asked about the money, he said, ‘No, beta, no money. I brought it for you, take it.’ He was a very open-hearted person.”Despite his legendary status, Rana routinely went out of his way to validate and encourage grassroots coaches working outside the national setup.“Compared to him, I am a very small coach. Coming from the Army, I haven’t achieved anything close to what he did,” Suresh said. “But whenever we met somewhere, he’d say, ‘Brother, you’re a good coach. You’re preparing good kids. You’re producing talent for India. We’ll take these kids forward, you don’t worry at all.’ He was always very helpful. He would say, ‘If you ever need to ask anything for any child, you can always ask me.‘”To him, technical insight was not proprietary information meant only for his personal pupils. If a young shooter from a different academy asked for technical adjustments or a quick tip, he would stand behind them at the lane, patiently breaking down the mechanics of the shot.When the team landed back in India, Suresh was at the airport at 2:00 AM to receive the students returning from the Munich World Cup. It was there that he noticed Rana was in physical distress.“He had already been having some trouble since Germany itself,” Suresh recalled. “And when he got off the flight, he was sweating too much. He looked uncomfortable. It was 2 AM, but as soon as he left the airport, he went straight to the hospital.”When the news of his sudden passing shook the shooting fraternity, the national team was gathered for a camp in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, the mountain state where Rana was born. The entire ecosystem he helped shape was present in his birthplace, but he was nowhere to be seen.Few felt the void more acutely than Manu Bhaker.“Manu is extremely in tremendous pain today because he was her personal coach,” Suresh added. “The whole team is here. As soon as Manu got the news, she immediately left for Delhi.”Beyond winning the medals for the country and coaching some of its finest talents, perhaps his greatest legacy lay in the acts of generosity that made a young athlete feel seen, a fellow coach feel valued, and one of his students leave the national camp behind to pay her final tributes. We may never see Jaspal Rana pacing the shooting ranges again, but will he truly leave?By dedicating his life entirely to “acche kaaran” (good cause), Rana gave life to the closing lines of Rabindranath Tagore‘s famous poem, “Mrityunjay” (Conqueror of Death):“No matter how great you become, you are not greater than death. I will depart leaving behind these final words: I am greater than death.”
