I have never been much of a shooter and have always been very bad with games that need to aim at stuffs. Shooting with a rifle at a bunch of multicolored balloons, pinned to a dirty white cloth three feet away at crowded Durga Puja fairs in home town has been the extent of my exposure to the trigger and the target (and I was bad even at that).
A few days back when I saw a deal for Nishaan Sports Shooting Academy, Bangalore offering 30 Rounds of Starter Air Rifle Shooting worth Rs 200 @ Rs 90 instead, it caught my interest and attention. After seeing that the online reviews for the place was good, I, along with a friend bought the deal from timesdeal and headed towards our destination on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Through out the 1.5 hrs that we had to spend in the bus to reach BTM Layout, 2nd stage, I kept on cursing the sun, the pollution and the traffic.
I find myself in a narrow corridor painted a fluorescent green, shocking enough to do serious damage to your existence, even before you think of guns and ammo. One of the corridor walls displays framed posters with motivational text – “Perfection is Our Goal” and “Knock the ‘T’ off the Can’t”. I can see the corridor end a few feet away and possibly leading into some sort of a lobby or a hall, but I hear no voices. I wait for a few seconds to see if I would hear gun shots, but the only sound that reaches my ears is that of the ever-angry Bangalore traffic bustling on the road below.
On reaching inside, I see a girl shooting at her target with an imported rifle and an instructor standing aside. Just nearby is the counter where we showed him the coupons we bought online and pay him Rs 180(for the two of us). Knowing my history with aims and targets, I am yet not sure if this is really good idea for me but finally I also decide to take a chance just for fun.
After I complete some formalities of entering my name in a register and pay attention to the instructor as he explains what I was getting myself into. He tells me that the range is designed for 10 meters Air Rifles and Air Pistol and as a first-timer I would be shooting with the Rifle. The Pistol is harder to master and it will be some time before I will be comfortable with it. He then appears from the booth carrying a small box and sheets of paper with targets printed on them. He explains that I have thirty shots and opens the box to reveal thirty tiny pellets stored inside.
The targets are square in shape, made of thick paper around six inches each side with concentric circles neatly printed on them. Hitting the outermost circle gets you a single point which increases as you go towards the center with the two innermost circles fetching you ten points. Circles 7-10 are painted black and the instructor indicates that is where I will end up shooting all the time, if I practice regularly for a couple of weeks.
The instructor illustrates the rather simple procedure of loading the pellet into the rifle and taking aim and I proceed to replicate it. I can see that I will not be wearing those cool headphone looking things or the transparent glasses which I have noticed shooters wearing, but there isn't time to fret over that as I am handed the rifle and asked to take my first shot. He then explains that to take aim I must first align the tiny marker at the head of the rifle to the target, then align that marker to a D shaped viewing panel right above the trigger. After the target is locked in view, he tells me to forget about it and focus only on the trigger and the press it in one smooth motion without any jerk or change in pressure.
We take position, the rifle butt pushing against the top right corner of my chest, my feet parallel to the target. I follow instructions and take aim and a deep breath, then hold it for a while trying to make the rifle stable and fix my eyes at the target. And then I let my finger go. It would have been a beautiful moment had everything gone as per plan. Instead, by the time I press the trigger, I can feel my hands and the rifle shaking like Shakira bringing on the World Cup and instead of a neat swoosh, the imaginary sound triggered by my moving finger is more like ‘thuk thataak’.
My first pellet lands somewhere outside the largest circle instead the center of the paper which I am actually targeting. Then the second pellet lands somewhere in circle 7 and the 3rd one hits the wall. The same thing keeps repeating for some 2-3 more shots. The instructor can see I am getting nowhere and so once in a while takes the rifle from my hands, again gives me instructions to properly stand and aim, tells me to correct my line of sight and keeps offering words of encouragement.
Then around the 8th or 9th time, I finally get a hit i.e. in the black circle so I get somewhat happy and encouraged to continue. By that time, my friend who came along somehow got the physics of the stuff wrong so hardly 2-3 of his pellets hit the paper n rest went to the wall. Somehow seeing myself better than him at making my shots on the paper atleast also was a source of encouragement for me(Sorry dude!).
After wasting around 9-10 of his shots, he finally figured out the right way to aim and shoot and ended up hitting the paper some 15 times out of which around 4 times he breached the black circles. However I have never been good at these stuffs but somehow I end up with around 20 out of 30 pellets piercing through the page out of which 4 times I breached the black circle and one was at the border separating the black circles from the white ones.
Finally after shooting for around 30-40 minutes, we were sweaty and tired. So we thank the instructor for the nice experience and walk out with our target sheets. Thought I would love to try it again but knowing my history with these stuffs, I have to think about it again!! ;)
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