Something unprecedented happened on the first Saturday of August 2021. Indian Twitter was abuzz about golf: a subject it hardly cares about. Usually, a live game gets less attention in India than, say, highlights of a 20-year-old cricket match. But on that Saturday, at 2 am IST, Indians were up, looking up definitions of birdies and bogeys, reading explainers, and refreshing the leaderboard. They all mentioned one name. #AditiAshok. A 23-year-old female Indian golfer, on the brink of winning a historic Olympic medal in Tokyo, had made tens of thousands wake up in the wee hours to watch a sport they had never watched before.
Aditi agonisingly missed out on a medal on the final day, to finish fourth. But she came close — close enough to push her countrymen to the edge of their seats, close enough to slightly lift her sport’s profile in her country. Her performance signalled the drifting away of golf being “an elite old man’s sport” in India.
