Ideas of India 2025: India is steadily establishing itself as a sporting powerhouse across various disciplines, demonstrating its potential to excel beyond just cricket.
Prakash Padukone, father of Bollywood star Deepika Padukone, became the youngest player to win the national senior championship at just 16 in 1971.
Reflecting on his journey to becoming a professional badminton player, he spoke about how the sport had little recognition in South India during his early years.
In an exclusive conversation with ABP Live during the Ideas of India 2025 summit, he said: ” You need to know how popular badminton was when I took up way back in the 1960s. So I started in 1962, when badminton was not very popular, especially in the Southern part of India. It was mainly played in the North, East and West. Nobody knew what badminton was in the South. There was another sport called ball-badminton which was very popular in the South, played only in India and is almost extinct now. So, it was very popular in all the Southern states. So in fact if you even went to any of the Southern states and said that you played badminton, it would mean ball-badminton. You had to specifically say that you play shuttle.
“In those days, in the whole of Bangalore, there were only five badminton courts and out of those five, three were wedding halls. So six months in a year it used to be booked for weddings, so if there were no weddings, we got to play badminton. So that was how popular badminton was back then. When I took up the sport, my father who was living in Bombay, moved to Bangalore and then he started the state association, so he was more of an administrator. I used to go along with him, so that’s how I got interested in the sport. Initially, I had no idea whether I would even play for the district or state. It was more that I enjoyed playing badminton. My father was my initial coach. Later on I picked up more by watching other players because there was no other way of learning. I started when I was seven and later when I was 15 or 16 when I won the national championship is when I thought of taking it up professionally.”
