India Cues for Glory

The craze for pool joints may have subsided, but cue sports is where India is making a mark.

Is there any sport where India can boast of having won not one or two but a whopping 20 world titles? The nation of India has an exotic mix of young and old talent in cue sports. Veterans like Geet Sethi and Ashok Shandilya are joined today by a talented bunch of youngsters who have been doing well beating folks with a stick. Sethi is now 45 and has been playing the sport for decades; he has "seen it all" and has been a role model for Indian youngsters, a rival and mentor for young pool professionals like Pankaj Advani.

Advani is one of the most promising players worldwide at the moment, one of a few players to have won world championships in Billiards and Snooker, at the tender age of 18. Recently, Dharminder Singh qualified for the world championship for Nine Ball and represents India in Britain's million-pound Guinness Nine Ball tour alongside other top shooters.

Although the craze for pool and snooker joints has subsided, cue sports has seen a lot of interest among club members. "There was a myth surrounding cue sports that they were played by middle-aged people where fitness didn't play a crucial role," says Manisha Malhotra, administrator of, Mittal Champion's Trust, which has taken a keen interest in developing cue sports on a national scale.

The Billiards and Snooker Federation of India is keen to hire foreign coaches for the game. But players feel authorities failed to fully exploit India's huge poolroom boom of the last few years. Snooker champion Yasin Merchant said, "To a certain extent, we failed to cash in during that time and missed the opportunity to take the game to a different level when a large number of aspiring youngsters had taken up cue sports during the boom."