Story of "what made me to learn Table Tennis".

It was some day in Feb 2007. It was around 7:00 pm in the evening. After a day of hard work, I ventured out to play Table Tennis (TT) in my employer's campus with my friend, who has the same skill as mine in playing the game. Our TT skills are at the best you can call it as "newbie" skills. While me and my friend trying our hands in the game, two people came near us. There were couple of tables present, so we got to share the table in round robin basis. Those two people - I guess one is Project leader and other his subordinate. The subordinate was a new babe of the campus at that time! They came and proposed an idea which made me feel like earth shaking.

Me and my fella formed a team and that girl and her supervisor formed another. Then the actual story started. We started to play. Initially, I thought at least the girl would be in my level in terms of TT skills, so I should be competing with only one guy. But in reality the story was different. She was just kept hitting in the right areas and scoring points with her quick reflexes. The earth shaking feeling was no more. It was replaced by "earth devastated by an asteroid" feeling. We played 5 matches and our team lost all of them thanks to the way me and my poor fella played and to her serves and returns. I wont say she was the best, but better than her supervisor. After one agonising hour, the show finally came to an end.

Men's DNA make-up is such a way that it is very hard to digest a defeat at the hands of women unless they are proven exceptionally talented. I fell prey to this so called male ego and it hit me like anything. There were lot of questions running in my mind, like "what would she think of my no performance?", "what on earth made me to play like this and fail to give a fight?" and things like that. And my fellow pal is no mood for it. He displayed no emotions. No regrets.

That moment something drove me to take up a challenge. A challenge to learn and play TT. From the next day onwards, I started to stay late in the evening in office, though my work demanded in some days, and practiced TT. I started to watch how good players play and then tried to implement in my game. Me and my friend practiced TT whenever we got time. We played with lot of good playing people. We lost many matches, but we were improving our game. This made me to play and practice more. As days passed, we actually started to win matches with our good play. Our own game and my skills improved greatly.

The wonderful thing is, more and more I started to play well and appreciate the game, I also started to forget the incident which triggered me to learn the game. Eventually, one fine day, by pure chance, we played against the same girl and her supervisor. This time, we overwhelmed them with our range of shots and serves. We won good number of matches against them and with lot other people. And I can say I have improved my game to a great level.

Success is a relative term. If I consider the level to which I have improved my TT skills is a success, then behind this success, that girl is the reason. So I should thank her for this little success of mine! No wonder this saying is so popular - "Behind every successful man, there is a woman" :)