Joydeep Karmakar was walking back to his Nagerbazar home when an acquaintance from the Dum Dum neighbourhood stopped him.

“Bengal theke shooting-ey ke ekta jyano Olympic-ey chance peyechhey (Who’s this someone from Bengal who has qualified for the Olympic shooting event)?” he asked.

“Amar moto dekhte (Does he look like me)?” Joydeep shot back, deadpan.

That was in end-February.

“The gentleman thought I was pulling his leg and walked off in a huff,” recalled the shooting star on the eve of his departure for London.

He has had another neighbour ask him: “Ei, tumi shooting kortey na (Hey, weren’t you into shooting)?”

But the dearth of recognition even in his own locality has not taken Joydeep’s focus off his goal for the Olympics.

The young man is more worried about what the weather in London would be on August 3 when he lines up for the prone event at the Royal Artillery Barrack, near Greenwich.

“Till last week, the weather was warm. But it has suddenly become cold and windy,” he said.

Joydeep is keeping his fingers crossed for cloudy weather with little wind when he fires his quota of 60 shots to qualify for the finals later that day.

But first, he has to rush to Eley, the ammunition manufacturing facility in Birmingham, to test the 0.22 bullets with which he will shoot in the Olympics.

“I am not satisfied with the stock I had been practising with. The bullets we had placed orders for with Eley seem to have got misplaced at the Sports Authority of India’s office in Delhi. It seems someone picked up the lot meant for me,” he said, shaking his head.

Joydeep is one of India’s two entries in the men’s 50m rifle prone event. Gagan Narang is the bigger name but the experts have high hopes on the Bengal shooter.

Among them is Bengal’s grand old lady of the shooting range. Sobhita Chatterjee, the 94-year-old former national champion, had told Metro that Joydeep’s consistent scores in prone were reason to believe he would “win something” in London.

Joydeep has been a prospective world-beater ever since he won the National Championship in 2005, not only setting a record but also defeating Indian shooting’s poster boy Abhinav Bindra. “It gave me the belief to carry on,” he said of that achievement.

The feat also won him a ticket to the Australian Open Championship. In his first international competition, he was trailing at seventh but went on to win it. “The result raised many eyebrows,” he said, smiling at the memory.

But his best shot so far has been silver at the ISSF World Cup in March 2010, where he missed the world record and the gold by a whisker.

Joydeep’s rise from the ranks at the North Calcutta Rifle Club in Belgachhia, which he had joined in 1989, has been a steady one.

It is this consistency that put him on the flight to London ahead of another shooter, Hari Om Singh, who had originally won the quota place for the event.

“Hari had qualified almost two years ago with a one-off fantastic score. But to ensure that an in-form shooter represents the country, the selection committee considers the best five scores of the last eight tournaments in the year before the Olympics. He fell far behind my aggregate,” Joydeep said.

Since his Olympic call-up in February, Joydeep has been running around for sponsors. “Abhinav advised me to contact his coach Heinz Reinkemeier. Once I won a place in the team, the door to his academy in Germany opened for me. But I had to request the academy to wait till the government released funds. Thank god, they agreed, else I would have had to wash their utensils to cover the Rs 22-lakh training cost.”

The money arrived just a week ago.

Over the last two months, Joydeep had been camping in Germany, alongside Bindra. “German shooter Maik Eckhardt has this training facility where Gaby Buehlmann (Bindra’s coach in Beijing, who was seen giving him a hug when he fired the winning shot) and her husband Reinkemeier train shooters from Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, besides us,” he said.

The combined training, he said, ensured there was no rivalry. “It was one big family out there, with no one in the national jersey.”

But the new .22 free Bleiker rifle, priced Rs 5.5 lakh, that Joydeep is carrying to London bears the Tricolour. “He had specifically asked for that,” said father Santo Karmakar, a three-time national swimming champion.

If Joydeep is feeling the pressure, it is because of his seven-year-old son. “Adriyan wants me to bring back a Nobel prize from the Games,” he said, beaming.

That, he conceded, was a “very tough task”. Bengal, of course, would be happy with just an Olympic medal.

What message do you have for Joydeep? Tell ttmetro@abpmail.com