Hi, I am starting a new series: Overall, to improve my storytelling skills. If you have any feedback or suggestion. Please share it with me.

This particular piece of writing is about how badminton and I evolved. Badminton came into my life in my adulthood days(class 7-9). I did not have a racket but my neighbor cousin had two, one for himself and another for his elder siblings.

we used to have an attached roof with a small wall to separate the two buildings. I use to jump and go to their roof for games and vice versa. Sometimes the wall used to be our net/boundary for badminton, other times some slippers lying around.

In the start when I learned badminton, like everyone else(or at least I hope so) I didn't know how to serve. Due to this, I was able to touch only half the services to my badminton racket. The goal of playing badminton was to make the game not to spoil it by dropping the shuttle but keep it in the air for as long as possible. There were very few matches I played for points because I was bad at it. This went on for years. sometimes we played in the garden however even then there was no badminton net available.

I bought my first racket in lockdown just before the second wave because my cousin went for MTech and in his college, he saw the real badminton game. So he ordered a racket from my Amazon account. The racket arrived and we started playing badminton by going into a garden nearby, as we didn't have any net, we used to make a boundary with slippers and assume the height of the net.

This went on for two weeks and as everyone does without a fixed routine and unemployment, we started drifting away from these practice sessions. I was studying for my MTech back then. My Mtech started in lockdown, so It has been almost 2 semesters and I have not seen a face of my college campus yet.

I joined my college offline in October 2021, This was the month when I set foot for the first time on any badminton court. The first time I experienced that these courts are big and people really play doubles, before that I used to think, they only play doubles because of space crunch(you can judge me on this).

Thanks for reading. The journey of playing badminton on the real court is coming soon in chapter 2. Please let me know if you liked/disliked(or felt any other emotions) by reading this write-up.