Support Mansi, An International Para Badminton Player With Her Spain Tournament #CrowdFunding
For those of you who are not aware, Manasi Joshi is a National and International level Para Badminton player. At the age of 22, Manasi met with an unfortunate accident and lost her left leg.
Manasi's inspirational story became viral after being shared by the page Humans Of Bombay, with over a 1000 shares within an hour and a lot of well deserved attention and support by people.
Lets hear it in her own words.
“I was on my way to work on a two wheeler one day when a trucked rammed into me and completely crushed my leg. It wasn’t the driver’s fault – there was a pillar which hindered his vision. People around immediately took me to the hospital and even though it happened around 9:30 am I was only operated upon at 5:30 pm. The doctors tried to save my leg but after a few days it got infected and had to be amputated. When the doctor told me, I asked him ‘why did you take so long? I knew for a while that this would happen.’
What got me through this whole ordeal is acceptance – that this is my fate, now I can either choose to cry about it, or take it with a pinch of salt and push myself…I picked the latter. In fact when people used to come to visit me in the hospital and get emotional — I would tell them jokes to make them laugh!
So I took the physiotherapy, and began to learn how to walk all over again. My biggest fear was that I wouldn’t be able to play badminton which has been my passion since childhood — but somehow even while I was facing difficulty in walking…I could play. I began winning corporate badminton tournaments, and on the suggestion of one of my amputee friends, I decided to try out at a National Level. I went on to win several medals at the National level and, this year I won Silver in the Para Badminton World Championship held in England. I’ve trained for 5 hours every day, whilst juggling my job as a software engineer, almost completed my training in Scuba Diving and traveled pretty much all over India. When people ask me, ‘how do you do so much?’ I just ask one question — ‘what’s stopping you?’”
Manasi never looked back, played multiple badminton tournaments and made her way up to the current World #3 para-badminton champion.
Manasi continues to train hard and aspires to become World #1. Her training getting more intensive and expensive by the day. So much that to avoid financial dependence on her family, she is working as a full time software engineer in Mumbai. Since Para Badminton is not fully supported by the government, Manasi herself manages her training and travel costs.
With the training getting more demanding and expenses getting bigger, it would get difficult for Manasi to fully support herself for long. We can show our support and help her get through her next international tournament at Spain being held from March 5 - 7th, 2017 by contributing towards funds beings raised for Manasi.
Contribute now and help Manasi play in the International Badminton Tournament at Spain and bring pride to the nation.
The article is written by Megha Dadarwal
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