187. The Murder of India’s Badminton Star: Syed Modi

Every year, on a Thursday in December, the best badminton players in the world, from China, Indonesia, Japan, Denmark, arrive in Lucknow to compete in a tournament. Flags go up. Stadiums fill. A name echoes across the announcer's PA system, repeated hundreds of times over several days, until it becomes just background noise to the people who have heard it their whole lives. That name is Syed Modi. What the crowds in those stadiums rarely talk about--what the gleaming trophy and the BWF World Tour branding don’t mention--is that Syed Modi was twenty-five years old when two men shot him dead outside a stadium gate in Lucknow on a July evening in 1988. He was India's greatest badminton player of his era. He was a Railway employee's son from a sugar mill town nobody had ever heard of. He was a husband who was betrayed. He was a father--of a two-month-old daughter he would never see grow up. And then, one evening, he was a body in a pool of blood. This is the story of Syed Modi. And it is also the story of everything India let get away.