Nobody Wanted to Build Arundhati. Everyone Wanted to Celebrate Her.
No one wants to support an athlete while they are becoming one. Everyone wants to celebrate them once they have won.
It could not be truer in the case of Arundhati Choudhary from Kota, who returned home to a hero’s welcome after winning a gold medal in her maiden Commonwealth Games appearance.
Arundhati was part of a dominant 14-member Indian boxing contingent that returned with 10 medals, including seven golds. Six of those gold medallists hailed from Haryana — India’s undisputed combat-sports nursery, a state with an established, well-oiled machinery for producing elite champions.
The lone outlier was Arundhati, born in Kota — a city famous not for boxing champions, but for IIT factories.
Since the early 2000s, Kota’s economy has been built around a single pursuit: clearing entrance examinations. After the boom of Bansal Classes, coaching giants such as Allen, Career Point, Resonance and Rao Academy sold middle-class India a non-negotiable dream.
Come to Kota if you want to get into the IITs.
Hostels, PGs, mess halls, gaming parlours and shopping complexes grew around keeping thousands of stressed teenagers inside a hyper-competitive bubble.
Almost nobody bothered to build anything else.
That Arundhati emerged from this academic pressure cooker to dominate international boxing is a story of defiance.
But on Friday, the very city that had offered her little by way of sporting infrastructure opened its arms to claim her glory.
Her house, on the outskirts of Kota, became a buzzing place. Relatives, neighbours and local politicians lined up to congratulate her — and, inevitably, pose for photographs.
Some of these were perhaps the same people who had not been particularly encouraging when her father, Suresh Choudhary, gave his daughter the freedom to pursue sport in Kota.
People circle success very quickly.
They are far less willing to stand beside it while it is still trying to become successful.
But this is not a story about Kota’s coaching industry or its economy.
It is about how India treats athletes like Arundhati before they win the gold medal.
AUGUST 5
A knackered Arundhati Choudhary and her family arrived early in the morning at Jaipur airport.
By then, she had become a sensation in Rajasthan for becoming the state’s first boxer to win a Commonwealth Games gold medal.
The family had expected someone from the sports federation to greet them.
Nobody came.
Family members living near Jaipur and local media representatives were there to receive them.
During the interviews, Arundhati was asked about the support from the state government and what had been done to enable her journey.
The 23-year-old, still far from media-trained, did not hide her disappointment.
“There are no proper facilities for boxing in Kota. It has been quite some time since I won the medal, but I have still not received any congratulations or encouragement from the state government or the sports minister,” Arundhati said.
“The players who are emerging from Rajasthan are making it on their own,” she added.
AUGUST 6
With no official reception waiting for them in Jaipur, Arundhati and her family did not need to halt there for long.
They left to meet relatives in different suburbs and villages on the way to Kota.
By the time they reached home late on August 6, her unfiltered airport remarks had rippled through Rajasthan’s political corridors.
Calls were made to her father, Suresh.
Functions were lined up.
Politicians and administrators began seeking time with the family to meet and congratulate the Commonwealth Games champion.
AUGUST 7
As the noise outside settled for a brief moment, Suresh sat back, his expression darkening with quiet reflection.
“We are a bad generation. We are a generation of bad people,” he told India Today at his house.
“Me, my peers, the people that I have worked with were only focused on earning money. We wanted more, more and more, and even today there is no stopping it when we amassed much beyond what can sustain us.”
There was deep remorse in his voice.
It was also the reason he had refused to let his children enter Kota’s commercial rat race.
His eldest daughter is now a doctor. His youngest son studies in Delhi.
Putting Arundhati into combat sports was initially less a grand sporting vision than a desperate attempt to channel her hyperactive aggression.
“I used to beat up kids my age when I was small,” Arundhati recalled with a slight grin, sitting beside her father. “I used to jump down from the first floor onto the bare ground just to see if I could. I don’t know why I did it. I just had this fire in me.”
Mid-sentence, the interview was interrupted.
A local political leader walked in, flanked by an aide holding a bright party banner. He handed Arundhati a shawl, posed for a photograph, drank a quick cup of tea and left.
There were more.
Outside the front door, a line was forming.
Local bank managers who handled the family’s accounts. Neighbourhood youth leaders. Self-proclaimed social workers.
Each group executed the same performative routine.
Does this get tiring? I asked her.
“Not really,” Arundhati shrugged. “It’s not like any of these people ever asked if I was alive before this.”
THE CITY WITHOUT A BOXING GYM
When the decision was taken to put Arundhati into boxing at around 12, Kota had almost nothing for the sport.
When Suresh eventually enrolled her at 14, Kota did not have a single dedicated boxing gym.
Funnily enough, it still doesn’t.
Arundhati trained under Ashok Gautam, a self-taught coach who had learned Wushu by watching YouTube videos.
When he was told Arundhati wanted to learn boxing, he went back to YouTube.
This time, he was learning boxing.
As Arundhati trained in Kota, her father travelled to neighbouring states looking for boxing infrastructure.
There wasn’t much to find.
At that age, Suresh was unwilling to send his daughter to Haryana or New Delhi simply so she could train properly.
So they made do.
“I don’t have many friends in the boxing circuit in India. Because I do not train in Haryana. I don’t want to, because the vibes do not match. They do not accept me. It is what it is,” Arundhati says.
She had entered a sport whose strongest ecosystem was somewhere else.
And she had entered it from a city that barely had an ecosystem of its own.
“When I am in Kota, I have to practise on a cricket ground. That is why I joined the Indian Army and am training there using the facilities available to me,” she said.
Even the stadium where she trained was in a state of disrepair.
The ground-floor structure exists, but the upper level was abandoned midway through construction years ago. Rusting, naked TMT rebar sticks out of the concrete overhead — a constant hazard for children running below.
Yet talent in the desert has a way of defying its surroundings.
Rajasthan is a landscape defined by harsh conditions, where life survives not because the soil is welcoming, but because its people possess a stubborn, bone-deep resilience.
- They find water in dry rock.
- They build hope out of almost nothing.
Arundhati’s boxing career was born from that same stubbornness.
Soon, she became a force in Indian boxing, beating athletes from established boxing strongholds.
The Haryana boxers from Bhiwani and Hisar were shaken.
Coaches began asking the same question:
Who is this boxer from Rajasthan?
Arundhati had become an outsider who could no longer be ignored.
To escape the lack of infrastructure at home, she accepted an offer from the Indian Army and now trains at the Army Sports Institute in Pune — the high-performance hub that has produced stars such as Avinash Sable, Gulveer Singh and, from her own boxing fraternity, Amit Panghal.
She is happy there.
So is her father.
AUGUST 8: THE LAND OF VULTURES
The Choudhary family woke up early.
After two tiring days of travel and meeting people, they had to travel back the way they had come.
Chief Minister Bhajanlal Sharma had organised a felicitation ceremony for the Commonwealth Games champion.
There, surrounded by cameras, he presented Arundhati with a ceremonial cheque for Rs 1 crore — the financial reward mandated under Rajasthan’s sports policy for major international achievements.
The cheque was part of an existing state policy, introduced six years ago by the Ashok Gehlot government, which increased the prize money for athletes four-fold.
This was the first time Arundhati had received a prize from the Rajasthan government.
The state had, eventually, rewarded its champion.
Her scathing remarks had achieved what years of silent struggle could not: forcing power to react.
“If my family wasn’t financially comfortable, none of this would have happened,” Suresh reflected before they left. “India is simply not a sustainable place. There is zero baseline support.”
“We are businessmen. But we cannot get a single thing done without doing ‘ji hazoori’ of people in power. Is that any better than any ‘gulami’?”
The sentiment extends beyond businessmen.
People who have the power to enable sport, business and opportunity often end up building systems that keep ordinary people dependent on those in power.
How can things work that way?
But it is not the system or even political apathy that hurts the Choudhary family most.
It is the betrayal by their own that stings.
The bitterest irony lies at the top of Rajasthan’s sports hierarchy.
The state’s Sports Minister is Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore — India’s first individual Olympic silver medallist in shooting.
Rathore knows firsthand the lonely, brutal grind of putting an under-resourced sport on the national map.
When he took charge of the sports ministry in late 2023, athletes across Rajasthan hoped that one of their own would finally dismantle the bureaucratic apathy.
Yet, on the ground in Kota, bare iron rebar still hangs over broken concrete.
And a Commonwealth champion still has to train on a cricket field.
Nobody wanted to build Arundhati.
Nobody wanted to stand beside her when she was still struggling to become a champion.
But the moment the gold medal arrived, everyone wanted a photograph.
That is the real story of Arundhati Choudhary.
Not how Kota celebrated its champion.
But how little Kota — and the system around her — did to help create one.
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