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Talk of emotional characters in Indian sport and Jaspal Rana is right up there with Leander Paes.

Even as the 30-year-old Delhi shooter wept after shooting a golden treble in Doha, friends were pulling his leg:
"Jassu, you have a career in Bollywood once your shooting career is over."

Rana shot back: "My career is far from over and there is a lot more gold and glitter to come."

As Rana proved in Doha, he may not be the latest, but he is still the greatest.

As an 18-year-old, when Rana gunned gold in an event called standard pistol at the junior World Shooting championship in Italy, he did not exactly have sports lovers craning their necks to catch a glimpse of him.

Within a few months when he returned from Hiroshima in 1994 after a golden hunt at the Asian Games, he was a superstar, showered with such epithets as 'James Bond' and 'boy with nerves of steel'.

However, the years between 2002 and 2006, were the toughest of his life, he says. He returned from the 2002 Busan Asian Games without a medal, something that was unthinkable for a champion of his calibre.

Those were trying times, when critics said Rana was over the hill, he had become too fat, and it was the next generation of shooting stars - Anjali Bhagwat, RVS Rathore, Abhinav Bindra and Samresh Jung - that was going to call the shots.

"I know that many people had written me off. But training in Dehradun with my father, I knew I would get my rhythm back," says Rana. And rhythm is the soul of shooting. A shooter actually squeezes the trigger between two heartbeats. And Jaspal's control and knowing when exactly he has to pull the trigger, separates him from the rest.

For someone who has won 23 gold medals and one silver in three editions of the SAF Games, eight gold, four silver and two bronze medals at the Commonwealth Games, besides four golds, two silvers and one bronze at the Asian Games, life has come full circle.

There's talk that his father, a former MLA, wants him to contest the elections. Will that disturb his skills with the pistol?