Dipika Pallikal Karthik

Dipika Rebecca Pallikal was born on September 21, 1991 in Chennai, India, into a Malayali family. Both her parents, Sanjiv and Susan Pallikal, are Syrian Christians originally from the state of Kerala. Her father runs his own business, Reach Management Consultancy. Her mother played international cricket for the Indian women's team and also captained the team. Interestingly, Dipika, who never liked cricket too much due to the fact it overshadowed most other sports in India, took up squash instead. She has two sisters, Divya and Dia. She attended Good Shepherd School and Lady Andal School before completing her graduation in English from Ethiraj College in Chennai in the 2012-13 academic year.

Dipika Pallikal Karthik played in an international tournament in London for the first time when she was in her sixth grade. She went on to win several tournaments on the European Junior Squash Circuit. She received the membership of the India Cements Squash Academy in 2002, following which she became the National Champion at the age of 11. She became a professional player in 2006, but her performance was inconsistent during the initial days. However, in the early 2011, she had a brief training stint in Egypt which dramatically increased her ability to deliver winning performances. She had started 2011 at 29th spot, and came into spotlight in December after winning 3 major WISPA tour titles to acquire a profession-first-class rating of 17, which made her the highest ranking Indian woman squash player ever, surpassing former national champion Misha Grewal's 27th rank in 1995. She finished in the top eight in the World Open, which took her to 14th rank in February 2012.

In December 2012, she became the first Indian player to broke into the top 10 Along the way, she became the first Indian to reach the summit clash of a Silver event, the first to reach the semi-finals of a gold event, and helped the Indian squash team finish fifth in the 2012 Women's World Team Squash Championships. She credits her trainers Cyrus Poncha and Major (rtd) S. Maniam for her success.

Dipika Pallikal Karthik boycotted the National Championship Squash competition from 2012 to 2015 due to inequality in prize money between women's championship winner and men's championship winner. At the time, the women's title winner only got 40% of the prize money of the men's title winner. The competition board finally agreed to equal prize money for the 2016 championships, in which she won the title by defeating Joshna Chinappa.