A national-level swimmer and UPSC aspirant, Raghav is striving every day to accomplish his little goals to achieve bigger milestones in life.

Raghav is a national-level swimmer and has played at the national level thrice. Besides, he has also won around twenty-five medals at district-level and fourteen medals at state-level tournaments. He also ranked 8th at the national level in Swimming.

Raghav originally hails from Bharatpur but for the past ten years, he has been living in Udaipur. He completed his schooling at DPS, Udaipur. Currently, he is doing his bachelors at Hansraj College, Delhi University.

Raghav always wanted to play some sport. One day he happened to visit Pichola lake in the city and he saw people swimming there. That’s when he thought of learning to swim. He started taking coaching in 2016. Initially, he just wanted to learn to swim, but later he started participating in various competitions. He says that he started much later in life and there were already swimmers who had won gold medals at district and state levels. But he worked hard and swam competitively and won three gold medals at the district level in just one year of learning it. He also participated at the state level and won a bronze medal. In 2018, he qualified for the national level. In 2019, he won his first gold medal at the state level.

Raghav recently sustained a ligament injury and owing to that and the Covid-19 pandemic, he is not able to practise swimming. Raghav’s future plans include passing the UPSC Civil Services Examinations and he is preparing for that.

Talking about hardships he faced in learning swimming, Raghav says that many a time he was scolded by his coach and his coach often doubted whether he would be able to do something in swimming. And often Raghav would feel sad about not being able to do his best despite putting in his best effort. But he says that due to the scolding of his coach only he was able to achieve many medals.

Earlier, Raghav was an introverted kid and lacked self-confidence. But when he took to swimming, he became confident and could talk to people easily, so much so that he has been leading the Udaipur Swimming Team for the past three years now.

Raghav thinks that playing sports keeps you fit and agile. Besides, it gives you the strength to fight tough situations in life.

Raghav advises parents to encourage their children to play sports. He says that only a formal education won’t suffice; playing sports prepares a child holistically. Besides, it doesn’t matter whether you send your kid to the best of private schools or to a government school, but you must encourage them to play sports.

Raghav says that motivation is an intrinsic quality and motivation gained from external sources is often short-lived. He says hard work, dedication and loyalty toward your goals help you achieve them. Besides, he also says that you should make productive use of your time and not squander it on mobile phones or chatting with your friends.

His life mantra is to be disciplined in every aspect of life to be successful.