In a weird way, as an actor, I've always wanted to be cast as an athlete or in an action film, because I resonated with those characters.

Now, I’m doing that in real life as myself -- and that's been really empowering.

During competitions, I have been genuinely blown away by how many people were watching all my stories every day while I was training, and how many people got their whole gym to watch when I was winning.

I genuinely wanted to do it for my community, to show what we can do and what is possible.

We sometimes don’t know what is possible until someone else goes and does it, or until we see what is actually possible by breaking down that particular door and taking up space and owning that space.

So for me, it was a stage and I wanted to own that stage and show people what we can achieve.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta ]