For Jaspal Rana, life isn’t quite about the past, present and the future. “You see, every morning has an evening, every evening a night, and every night another morning,” he says with a sigh tinged more with relief than despair, now that he roams the streets with three Asian Games gold medals in his pocket. “So if you can’t do something one morning, life always gives you another chance. All you need to do is work hard, and remain focused.”

Having picked up three gold medals for India, Rana is now going about placing himself in the league of gentlemen who refuse to buckle under pressure, and return from near oblivion to give glory yet another shot. “Look at Ganguly. He came back,” he says. “You just have to have the right attitude.”

Of course, Rana has reasons to shoot off his mouth these days. After all, life hasn’t been kind to him in the recent past. He had sought to keep mum, relying on his gun to do the talking. But now that the recoils have sent ripples across the Indian sports fraternity, Rana is talking, for a change.

But, then, he has lot to speak on. After all, the 30-year-old Uttaranchali took to shooting early in his life. His father, Narain Singh Rana, a former Indo-Tibetan Border Police personnel, shifted home from Mussoorie to Delhi when he was given charge of training members of the Prime Minister’s Special Protection Group (SPG). Much of Rana’s childhood was spent on firing ranges in Delhi where his father would spend hours teaching SPG staff how to hit the bull’s eye. Naturally, when it came to playing with guns, Rana picked up the real thing, as opposed to toy M-16s that most of his classmates in Delhi’s Air Force Central School were drooling over.

Rana, who later went on to study at St Stephen’s College, began his shooting career at 11, that too with a bang. He picked up a gold and a bronze at the Delhi State Shooting Championship in 1987. A year later, he made his national debut by winning a silver at the National Shooting Championship in Ahmedabad. The same year he bagged two silvers at the New Delhi Rifle Shooting Championship. In 1991, he went on to pick up the Best Shooter title with four gold and two silver medals at the North Zone Inter-State Shooting Championship in Chandigarh.

Things really took a turn for Rana — who still pigs out on lip-smacking, home-made dal-chaawal — when he came back from the 1994 Hiroshima Asian Games with a gold and a bronze, coupled with a silver and a bronze from the Victoria Commonwealth Games. It was also the year when he had picked up a gold at the World Shooting Championship (Junior Section) in Milan. As an 18-year-old, Rana had become the new face of Indian shooting and an Arjuna Award for his achievements only cemented his new-found position.

Then, all of a sudden, the medals dried up. And Rana — who, apart from Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar, still loves listening to Garhwali music, though he admits he doesn’t follow much of the lyrics — had fallen upon hard times. The results were disappointing, the sponsorships dried up. His first employers, JCT, who had backed him strongly in his initial years, were turning cold, and Rana eventually found himself under the patronage of the sports-loving state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation.

Things picked up in 2002, when Rana returned from the Manchester Commonwealth Games with four golds, and was subsequently awarded the Padma Shree. But until the Doha Games, he had failed to put up a convincing show and prove to the world that his glory days were far from over.

In between, he had his share of problems. When his coach, Australian Tibor Gonczal, was phased out by the Sports Authority of India (SAI), Rana refused to train under other coaches who he thought couldn’t match Gonczal’s abilities. His stance ruffled several feathers in the power corridors, and Rana — who, meanwhile, had made a political debut by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party — was left buffeting a strong tide.

“The SAI stopped his ammunition supply for two years,” says Narain Rana from Dehra Dun, where he oversees activities at the Jaspal Rana Shooting Academy which was founded by Rana in 2000-2001 to breed young shooting aspirants. “He didn’t even have a coach. Things were so bad that I asked him to come to Dehra Dun and go through dry practice under me. But Jaspal is mentally very tough. Even such hardships didn’t put him down.”

Baljeet Singh Sethi, secretary of the National Rifles Association of India, agrees. “He didn’t want to go to Doha. I had to literally force him,” says Sethi. “But I knew he would perform well this time round. He always performs well when he’s under pressure.”

And so he did. In Doha, Rana battled fever and frayed nerves to capture his three golds, the last coming in a world-record equaling feat in his favourite event, the centre fire pistol.

Now, barely a week later, the tables seem to have turned. A victorious Rana returned from the Games to speak out once again in favour of his former coach Gonczal, saying he should be reinstated.

In the past, no one paid heed to his words — in the absence of results, they took it for excuses that losers often resorted to in the face of failure. Now, of course, they have little option but to listen.

Figuratively speaking, it’s called hitting between the eyes. Rana has done just that for real.