Zareen will tell you that she is “Nikhat, a different person, a different boxer, there is no reason to compare.” She’s right, of course.īut if you had to pick someone to take the torch from India’s first Olympic-medalling woman in this sport, you could hardly do better the tight-lipped, tenacious Zareen. It’s another trait we saw in Mary Kom, this flurry of technique and gift of movement. She works on her opponent with a fierce precision, landing almost everything she throws - a feinted jab followed by a half-hook with the same hand, a smashing overhead punch with her right hand following a left-handed jab, a lightning change of level as she aims for the midriff with the left hand, only to follow it up with a right hook to the head.

Zareen is quick in the ring, light on her toes, switching stance from right-handed to southpaw to back, in a final sparring session before the Worlds. “Everything is a competition for her,” India’s high-performance director Bernard Dunne said, after a friendly, light game of badminton post-training between him and Zareen turned into a teeth-clenching, haranguing slugfest. There’s one thing that seems unchanged: The woman at the top is a fast-punching, no-talking embodiment of power. And it’s not Mary Kom but Zareen, the 26-year-old phenomenon from Nizamabad, who is the top boxer in the country. The boxing hall in Patiala finally has world-class equipment instead of struggling to find good boxers to groom, India’s chief coach Bhaskar Bhatt tells me the institute is spoilt for choice as waves of young girls and women take to the sport. “When someone is in the ring with me, I hate them,” Mary Kom had told me then. It was MC Mary Kom, on a hot April morning more than a decade ago, in the slightly rundown boxing hall at the National Institute of Sports in Patiala, preparing for her long-awaited Olympic debut.

Who was it I had seen in training before who had this sense of fiery menace, determination written all over her who did not crack jokes, did not even speak and who fixed you in a death stare that made the knees quiver?

Watching Nikhat Zareen train, a few days before the ongoing IBA Women’s World Boxing Championships began in New Delhi, I was hit by a strong sense of déjà vu.

Robert de niro boxing