Manika Batra refuses national coach's help during first round match at Tokyo Olympics
Tokyo: India's table tennis star Manika Batra on Saturday refused to take advice of national coach Soumyadeep Roy during her first round match at the Tokyo Olympics after her personal coach was not granted on-court access.
World number 62 Manika won the match against 94th-ranked Tin-Tin Ho of Britain 4-0 but no one was sitting in the coach's corner and that attracted a lot of attention on social media.
Manika's personal coach Sanmay Paranjape was controversially cleared to travel with her to Tokyo but is not allowed to stay at the Games Village with the national team. He is staying in a hotel and is allowed access only for training sessions.
The 26-year-old had wanted Paranajpe's accreditation to be upgraded so that he could be court-side during her matches but team leader M P Singh, who is also a TTFI advisor and is in Tokyo, said Manika's request for field-of-play access to her coach was denied by the organisers.
"After her request for on court access for her personal coach was denied, she refused to be coached by our national coach. I had to intervene in the matter but she also refused me to take Roy's advice during the match," Singh told PTI.
However, Roy was seen court-side when Sharath Kamal and Manika played their round of 16 match in mixed doubles. Roy is a member of the gold winning men's team at the 2006 Commonwealth Games and has been a longtime teammate to India's table tennis great Sharath.
Manika was not available for comment.
With the Games happening in COVID-times, there were more restrictions on the number of support staff allowed with the team than usual. Paranjape, who is based in Pune, was cleared to travel to Tokyo but G Sathiyan's coach S Raman, who is an Olympian, was not.
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Fake notes with 'movie shooting purpose only' written on them send police into tizzy in Sirsi
Sirsi (Karnataka), Apr 8 (PTI): The police in Uttar Kannada went into a tizzy on Tuesday after they found fake currency notes of Rs 500 denomination from a house in Dandeli with 'movie shooting purpose only' written on them.
Based on a tip-off, police searched a rented house at Gandhinagar in Dandeli and confiscated the fake currency notes along with a money counting machine.
Arshad Khan, who is said to be from Goa, was staying as a tenant in the house belonging to Noorjan Jhunjuwadkar, police said.
Police were informed after Jhunjuwadkar noticed that Khan was absent from the house for the past one month.
The fake currency notes had the inscription 'Reverse Bank of India' on them, but did not have the signature of the RBI governor, police said.
The notes were printed on a shining paper with only zeros written in the place of the number, and 'movie shooting purpose only' inscribed on them, police said.
A hunt is on to trace Khan to question him about the seizure, they added.
