Subramaniam Raman

Subramaniam Raman, born in Chennai, is an Arjuna Award table tennis player.

Childhood

Subramaniam Raman was born in a middle-class family with two brothers and a sister. Born as a left-handed twin, he was very thin. Since he was very thin, lanky and fragile, Raman felt playing this celluloid game was the safest option. Starting at the age of 13, Raman learnt the basics of table tennis from V.Ramachandran. His first impression was made in the sport by Bro. Savari Antony, sports head and a left-handed TT player. A. Srinivasa Rao and Muralidhara Rao then coached him, before he moved on to V. Chandrasekar in 1989.^[1]

Raman learnt the nuances of the game at the Santhome school.

Career

Raman represented the state in the year 1985 and INDIA in 1989 SAF GAMES, Islamabad. Raman won his first National title, beating his long-time nemesis, S. Sriram in the final at Goa in the year 1993. Raman recorded his first-ever win over S. Sriram. Raman first represented India at the World Table Tennis Championships in the year 1993, Dortmund, Germany.

Since he was a left-handed with PIPS on one-side, Raman could get good results easily. So he was more passionate about physical training than the technicalities of the sport. While this was enjoyable and fun, when faced with some good opponents, strong with lefties, Raman did not get the desired results in the game. He played 5 national finals only to win one out of five. This raised lot of questions about his ability to rise to the occasion at the big matches. Raman realized that he needed to make lot of technical adjustments, block the holes and weak areas and also get mentally relaxed and tougher. Raman decided to learn Yoga and practice breathing exercises to control his emotions. He also started visualizing match-play situations to avoid match-anxiety arousal. Raman was down with injury the full tournament calendar in the year 1995. It was a Cervical Disc pro-lapse on c-5/c-6 Column and this turned out to be the turning point of his sporting career.

Raman started to work on his technique and shifted from a predominantly fore-hand player to an all-round player, to stay longer at the top. It was a change of mind-set, technique, adjustments, etal. This started to pay dividends as Raman was a more rounded player now, being able to tackle different players in the same vein. He had gone through a lean patch, but in the end resilience turned things in his favor.

Raman won the first-ever Commonwealth Gold for India at the Commonwealth Championships—held at Glasgow, Scotland—in Men's Doubles partnering with his compatriot Chetan Baboor in 1997, and repeated the feat in the next edition in 1999. Raman represented India for more than a decade with many International medals. Raman represented India at the Sydney Summer Olympics 2000, Millennium Olympics.

Raman married B. Bhuvaneswari, a former India No. 1 Table Tennis player, Common-wealth medalist, who has represented India in various International tournaments for over a decade.

Raman received the Arjuna Award for the year 1998 and also received many more State and Central Govt. awards.

References