It may be considered anti-nationalist not to appear self-congratulatory today. After all, it’s just one day since our great nation has secured its first individual gold medal in the Olympic games. A hundred years’ shame finally wiped out, screamed one headline. Never did a single medal matter so much to so many people, pontificated another. If Debkanta Baruah had been alive today, he would certainly have had to rephrase his immortal line Indira is India into Abhinav is India today. Suddenly it appears that it is one of those moments that Nehru evocatively described as those that come but rarely in history. One of those moments that would supposedly rewrite India’s sporting history forever and propel it right into the pinnacle of sporting achievements every time its athletes now take the field. A kind of Roger Banister moment, so to speak, when an exceptional individual finally manages, by dint of his own determination and hard word, to finally break through a mental barrier and then the insurmountable suddenly becomes very achievable for everyone.
When we would be made to study industrial revolution in our undergraduate days, the phrase that our teacher used for this kind of developments is take off. It meant a moment when you no longer had to walk or run or perhaps drive a horse-carriage to cover a certain distance as a matter of course for lack of faster options but had broken off the technological barriers to take flights as you wished. You could therefore cover much more distance within a much smaller period of time and begin to perform with ease tasks that till yesterday appeared impossible miracles. This phrase, of course, was deployed metaphorically, for the Wright brothers were still a few years away from their ‘take off’ moment, as it were. Our teacher would quote W.W.Rostow, the revered historian who probably coined the phrase and tell us how one fine morning the Enligh scientists came up with this steam engine thing and then they sat astride it and then beat up the whole wide world into submission-Pax Britanica. To be fair to him though, he also took us back to a lot of other things, including Weber’s protestant ethic and cultivation of turnips and enclosure movements and so much more. The problem was that when we had to write our answers, we were nonetheless supposed to focus on that ‘take off’ moment between 1860 and 1880 as the most decisive factor behind the emergence of the modern world, as it were. Or else, we were to remain second-class students, like I will always. I so sorely wish I could take my graduate tests once again, now that I have learnt how to please examiners and compromise my integrity just to move up in life, whatever that means. Sometimes I keep wondering whether the undergraduate students of history in India today are encouraged to move beyond the ‘take off’ version of things and my guess is that they are not. I suspect the same fare is dished out to all of us today in the name of celebrating uncritically what clearly remains the exclusive achievement of one outstanding individual.
In other words, I am not so sure if this is the ‘take off’ moment for Indian sports as a whole, or for the nation and its citizens, as is being claimed by many, including the mandarins in the media. By ‘sports’ I refer only to the non-cricket disciplines because everyone who is anyone seems to have already reached a consensus that the take off moment in cricket is already a quarter century old. I have things to say on that score too but if I do that in this very post, then I shall have no more enemy left to make. Here, I will first try to show why Bindra’s accomplishment is not going to radically change India’s sporting fortunes for the better, and then present two other, potentially equally promising, ‘take off’ moments the likes of which are accomplished by people like you and me and continue to happen everyday. I would then like to ask, naively if you please, whether such moments cannot be hailed as ‘take off’ moments only because they are not watched by millions of people and performed in a sporting spectacle staged with billions of dollars’ investment.
Abhinav Bindra is a very special man. He had been an exceptional student, reportedly the best head boy his school has ever had. He topped the entrance test of Doon School, where too he must have done very well. He would have gone on to excel in academics but for his single minded devotion to shooting. He dotes on his parents, as witness the small Hindi couplet he wrote immediately after his victory where he described the road that he has taken to reach the summit today as paved with the blessings of his parents. He has overcome a very major injury and an unfortunate technical impediment that effectively preempted his medal hopes in the last Olympic. He was mocked as a spent force when he pulled himself out of the Asian Games two years ago. He spent the couple of months or so in Germany, undergoing a training regime befitting perhaps the army commandoes, so as to prevail over his mental stresses. He had prepared, as he told a sports journalist a year ago, to hit the bull’s eye even on a day when the conditions might not be conducive and he might not get the right ‘feel’, because occasions like an Olympic competition do not come everyday. As the journalist evocatively wrote, befitting the spirit of the business daily in which the interview was published, Bindra had invested his four years for a singular couple of hours. Anyone who fails to doff his hat in admiration for such a character is either plain jealous or decidedly out of his mind.
Acknowledging and even admiring Bindra’s greatness is not the same as mindlessly appropriating his moment of glory to the service of repeatedly asserting India’s moment of arrival on the world stage. On the eve of the 61st anniversary of our political freedom, it is a matter of supreme irony if we continue to proclaim our dependence on the approval of the ‘hyperreal’ west for our own sporting glory. It is a matter of some happiness that an Indian national has won an individual Olympic gold medal, because it is a multilateral sporting event with a rich history and tradition and it does foster some amount of international harmony. Frankly though India’s success as a nation need not be measured by the number of gold medals its Olympic contingent brings back. Just as India as a whole did not become more beautiful after its ladies started winning one beauty pageant after another in mid and late nineties, and India need not have launched a visceral wave of loud protests when an Indian actress was supposedly racially abused on a reality TV show in Britain. The Taj Mahal did not need some millions of sms from ‘Indians’ all over the world—what an oxymoronic phrase—to show the world that it is one of the seven
wonders of the world. In fact, the more we respond to such categories, without even once pausing to actually wonder what such a tag means, the more powerfully we proclaim our dependence on them up there in the west, who set the terms of the discourse for us, always. The prestige and honor of a sixty year old nation—although I am not clear what this phrase means—that also boasts of a 5000 year old civilization—yet another blinder here—just cannot be so fragile that it has to take offence at the drop of a hat or has to flex its muscles every time one of its citizens wins a beauty pageant or a sporting contest.
What makes Bindra’s golden show an ‘Indian’ victory? If it is the fact that he carries an Indian passport, and lives in a place within the territorial borders of the Indian nation state, there is nothing to argue against. Both these statements of facts are as true and empirically irrefutable as the fact that hundreds of thousands of men and women living within the same territorial limits do not get enough to make a living. By the same logic, if one individual’s stellar show in a multilateral sporting arena is an indicator of India’s success, then so many individuals’ struggle to survive is a much more forceful index of its failure. Second, to what extent can we attribute Bindra’s success to the sporting infrastructure made available by the Indian state? Reports have quoted officials running the ‘best’ shooting range in India as acknowledging that he seldom visited the facility. The same officials incidentally also admitted that the so called best shooting range in India has not undergone any upgradation since 1982, which was before Bindra was even born. He normally practiced in a range with state of the art facilities at his own farmhouse in Chandigarh, built exclusively for him by his father who is a reasonably wealthy businessman now planning to gift his son a 200 crore 5 star hotel in Dehradun. As we saw earlier, he spent the couple of months before the Olympics in Germany for special tenacity training, the cost of which was borne entirely by his family. Even otherwise, the cost of his training, that works out to be about a crore a year, is borne entirely by his family.
Thus it transpires that Bindra represents a minuscule minority of Indians who can afford the very best training in the world, something that the state has failed miserably to provide to the average Indian. This is, however, not to undermine his remarkable gifts as an individual, nor to imply that prosperity alone breeds a champion. I rather wish to highlight the structural or for that matter infrastructural deficiencies in the way sports are run in this country. At the same time I refuse to accept that individuals with same physical and attitudinal gifts like Bindra are not available in India. However harsh it may sound, in some sports it helps to be born in a rich household, although it is not a fault of Bindra that he was born in one. He was plain lucky and he must thank his parents, which the lovely man that he is he has promptly done. Before someone rushes for my shirt collar, I challenge them to scoop out another Bindra from the bylanes of Chandni chowk or the slums of Mumbai and I promise I’ll be the happiest man ever who got beaten in public. However much the government and everyone else now try to outdo each other in felicitating Bindra with monetary rewards, the fact that he has won this gold medal not because of but despite the system is out there in broad daylight for all of us to see. Therefore, I refuse to celebrate this moment of euphoria as a moment of national glory but choose to mourn it as a moment of national opportunism. We as a nation have failed to deliver and we want everyone to keep quiet about it. Such moments of rare individual accomplishments are great fodder for both the state and the media who will now play it up to no end and refuse to take and ask hard questions. More importantly, these selective celebrations push to the background remarkable achievements of ordinary individuals like your friend x or your dhobi y, two of which I propose to highlight for you. I have not taken any labor to unearth them. They are out there for all of us to see, if only we care to look out. The two that I am going to relate now are very much there in today’s newspapers but while you’ll continue to hear about Bindra marvel for years to come, never again will you get to hear about these ordinary Indians who keep performing extraordinary feats right before your and my eyes, all the time.
Usha Tanwar, mother of an armyman, who died yesterday at 67, donated six of her organs, giving new life to six different individuals. Let me correct myself here and bring in the family too. It’s her son who actually took the decision when doctors had declared that she was already brain dead. Her 5 year old granddaughter who had been born with a defective heart valve has been one of the recipients, along with an unnamed 54 year old war veteran with a damaged kidney. Tanwar did occasionally talk about donating her organs but had not formally made the pledge. Her son and other family members deserve kudos for going ahead with the decision nonetheless, and not sentimentally insisting on a hindu cremation and worrying about divine merit and all that rubbish. Now how many of us would be inspired by her example and come forward to donate our organs after our death? Very few, if not absolutely none. Similarly, very few, too few, among us would actually be able to do a Bindra. My point ,therefore, is let us also celebrate Tanwar and her family, for they too have managed to effectively overcome an enormously powerful mental barrier. Why don’t we think of some sort of incentive for organ donors so that more of them find it worthwhile to come forward and help medical research and treatment? Can we, for instance, promise the family free treatment for life in a superspeciality hospital, for say 20 years? I know we shall never take such a step, because taking our family to Beijing will certainly get us much more publicity.
But the trustees of a trust that has decided to train first generation educated tribals for BPO jobs in the interiors of rural Gujrat must have been different. When I say ‘tribals’ I mean men and women who otherwise struggle to make ends meet, but with the promise of a better dawn, do not mind undertaking 25 kilometer journeys back and forth everyday, some with their husbands and some others after cooking and dispatching their husbands and children to their respective schools and workplaces. Some of then are actually wearing T shirts and trousers for the first time in their whole life and yet most of them have been safely cruising towards the completion of the course, and hundreds more have registered for the next batch. I recall a speaker, a university professor, in a seminar a year ago, lamenting about some inherent cultural reservations of the poor and tribals for which they reportedly refuse to avail of assistance from government and well meaning organizations. He may have faced some such experience himself, for I knew he was genuinely concerned and certainly not lying but I am not sure if his observations can be generalized and I wish he reads today’s newspaper. No I am not going to take it to him, I am not that sort of a chap.
To return to where I began, I do not really know which of these three events that took place yesterday, broadly speaking, is the fittest to be designated as a good enough—or rather the best—‘take off’ moment. I am plain confused as to which of these will change India like never before, and in another day or two, send me or you up over the moon, or remove hunger from this land for ever. Frankly, I suffer from no delusion about the level of my IQ and all sorts of help are welcome. Let me meanwhile leave you with this funny reaction of people when they suddenly saw the Indian contingent going wild with celebration on hearing that Bindra had won gold. Fully grown men and women, a report said, were seen singing and dancing rapturously in the middle of the stadium, and athletes and officials from other countries were staring at them with utter bemusement. How would they know, went ahead the breathless reporter, how this single piece gold matter so much to so many people back in India? In this I am sorry to confess that I am not one of these so many people and would rather side with those bemused foreigners. That said, my saying sorry probably also means that I am actually utterly confused. But I am happy that I am.
When we would be made to study industrial revolution in our undergraduate days, the phrase that our teacher used for this kind of developments is take off. It meant a moment when you no longer had to walk or run or perhaps drive a horse-carriage to cover a certain distance as a matter of course for lack of faster options but had broken off the technological barriers to take flights as you wished. You could therefore cover much more distance within a much smaller period of time and begin to perform with ease tasks that till yesterday appeared impossible miracles. This phrase, of course, was deployed metaphorically, for the Wright brothers were still a few years away from their ‘take off’ moment, as it were. Our teacher would quote W.W.Rostow, the revered historian who probably coined the phrase and tell us how one fine morning the Enligh scientists came up with this steam engine thing and then they sat astride it and then beat up the whole wide world into submission-Pax Britanica. To be fair to him though, he also took us back to a lot of other things, including Weber’s protestant ethic and cultivation of turnips and enclosure movements and so much more. The problem was that when we had to write our answers, we were nonetheless supposed to focus on that ‘take off’ moment between 1860 and 1880 as the most decisive factor behind the emergence of the modern world, as it were. Or else, we were to remain second-class students, like I will always. I so sorely wish I could take my graduate tests once again, now that I have learnt how to please examiners and compromise my integrity just to move up in life, whatever that means. Sometimes I keep wondering whether the undergraduate students of history in India today are encouraged to move beyond the ‘take off’ version of things and my guess is that they are not. I suspect the same fare is dished out to all of us today in the name of celebrating uncritically what clearly remains the exclusive achievement of one outstanding individual.
In other words, I am not so sure if this is the ‘take off’ moment for Indian sports as a whole, or for the nation and its citizens, as is being claimed by many, including the mandarins in the media. By ‘sports’ I refer only to the non-cricket disciplines because everyone who is anyone seems to have already reached a consensus that the take off moment in cricket is already a quarter century old. I have things to say on that score too but if I do that in this very post, then I shall have no more enemy left to make. Here, I will first try to show why Bindra’s accomplishment is not going to radically change India’s sporting fortunes for the better, and then present two other, potentially equally promising, ‘take off’ moments the likes of which are accomplished by people like you and me and continue to happen everyday. I would then like to ask, naively if you please, whether such moments cannot be hailed as ‘take off’ moments only because they are not watched by millions of people and performed in a sporting spectacle staged with billions of dollars’ investment.
Abhinav Bindra is a very special man. He had been an exceptional student, reportedly the best head boy his school has ever had. He topped the entrance test of Doon School, where too he must have done very well. He would have gone on to excel in academics but for his single minded devotion to shooting. He dotes on his parents, as witness the small Hindi couplet he wrote immediately after his victory where he described the road that he has taken to reach the summit today as paved with the blessings of his parents. He has overcome a very major injury and an unfortunate technical impediment that effectively preempted his medal hopes in the last Olympic. He was mocked as a spent force when he pulled himself out of the Asian Games two years ago. He spent the couple of months or so in Germany, undergoing a training regime befitting perhaps the army commandoes, so as to prevail over his mental stresses. He had prepared, as he told a sports journalist a year ago, to hit the bull’s eye even on a day when the conditions might not be conducive and he might not get the right ‘feel’, because occasions like an Olympic competition do not come everyday. As the journalist evocatively wrote, befitting the spirit of the business daily in which the interview was published, Bindra had invested his four years for a singular couple of hours. Anyone who fails to doff his hat in admiration for such a character is either plain jealous or decidedly out of his mind.
Acknowledging and even admiring Bindra’s greatness is not the same as mindlessly appropriating his moment of glory to the service of repeatedly asserting India’s moment of arrival on the world stage. On the eve of the 61st anniversary of our political freedom, it is a matter of supreme irony if we continue to proclaim our dependence on the approval of the ‘hyperreal’ west for our own sporting glory. It is a matter of some happiness that an Indian national has won an individual Olympic gold medal, because it is a multilateral sporting event with a rich history and tradition and it does foster some amount of international harmony. Frankly though India’s success as a nation need not be measured by the number of gold medals its Olympic contingent brings back. Just as India as a whole did not become more beautiful after its ladies started winning one beauty pageant after another in mid and late nineties, and India need not have launched a visceral wave of loud protests when an Indian actress was supposedly racially abused on a reality TV show in Britain. The Taj Mahal did not need some millions of sms from ‘Indians’ all over the world—what an oxymoronic phrase—to show the world that it is one of the seven
wonders of the world. In fact, the more we respond to such categories, without even once pausing to actually wonder what such a tag means, the more powerfully we proclaim our dependence on them up there in the west, who set the terms of the discourse for us, always. The prestige and honor of a sixty year old nation—although I am not clear what this phrase means—that also boasts of a 5000 year old civilization—yet another blinder here—just cannot be so fragile that it has to take offence at the drop of a hat or has to flex its muscles every time one of its citizens wins a beauty pageant or a sporting contest.
What makes Bindra’s golden show an ‘Indian’ victory? If it is the fact that he carries an Indian passport, and lives in a place within the territorial borders of the Indian nation state, there is nothing to argue against. Both these statements of facts are as true and empirically irrefutable as the fact that hundreds of thousands of men and women living within the same territorial limits do not get enough to make a living. By the same logic, if one individual’s stellar show in a multilateral sporting arena is an indicator of India’s success, then so many individuals’ struggle to survive is a much more forceful index of its failure. Second, to what extent can we attribute Bindra’s success to the sporting infrastructure made available by the Indian state? Reports have quoted officials running the ‘best’ shooting range in India as acknowledging that he seldom visited the facility. The same officials incidentally also admitted that the so called best shooting range in India has not undergone any upgradation since 1982, which was before Bindra was even born. He normally practiced in a range with state of the art facilities at his own farmhouse in Chandigarh, built exclusively for him by his father who is a reasonably wealthy businessman now planning to gift his son a 200 crore 5 star hotel in Dehradun. As we saw earlier, he spent the couple of months before the Olympics in Germany for special tenacity training, the cost of which was borne entirely by his family. Even otherwise, the cost of his training, that works out to be about a crore a year, is borne entirely by his family.
Thus it transpires that Bindra represents a minuscule minority of Indians who can afford the very best training in the world, something that the state has failed miserably to provide to the average Indian. This is, however, not to undermine his remarkable gifts as an individual, nor to imply that prosperity alone breeds a champion. I rather wish to highlight the structural or for that matter infrastructural deficiencies in the way sports are run in this country. At the same time I refuse to accept that individuals with same physical and attitudinal gifts like Bindra are not available in India. However harsh it may sound, in some sports it helps to be born in a rich household, although it is not a fault of Bindra that he was born in one. He was plain lucky and he must thank his parents, which the lovely man that he is he has promptly done. Before someone rushes for my shirt collar, I challenge them to scoop out another Bindra from the bylanes of Chandni chowk or the slums of Mumbai and I promise I’ll be the happiest man ever who got beaten in public. However much the government and everyone else now try to outdo each other in felicitating Bindra with monetary rewards, the fact that he has won this gold medal not because of but despite the system is out there in broad daylight for all of us to see. Therefore, I refuse to celebrate this moment of euphoria as a moment of national glory but choose to mourn it as a moment of national opportunism. We as a nation have failed to deliver and we want everyone to keep quiet about it. Such moments of rare individual accomplishments are great fodder for both the state and the media who will now play it up to no end and refuse to take and ask hard questions. More importantly, these selective celebrations push to the background remarkable achievements of ordinary individuals like your friend x or your dhobi y, two of which I propose to highlight for you. I have not taken any labor to unearth them. They are out there for all of us to see, if only we care to look out. The two that I am going to relate now are very much there in today’s newspapers but while you’ll continue to hear about Bindra marvel for years to come, never again will you get to hear about these ordinary Indians who keep performing extraordinary feats right before your and my eyes, all the time.
Usha Tanwar, mother of an armyman, who died yesterday at 67, donated six of her organs, giving new life to six different individuals. Let me correct myself here and bring in the family too. It’s her son who actually took the decision when doctors had declared that she was already brain dead. Her 5 year old granddaughter who had been born with a defective heart valve has been one of the recipients, along with an unnamed 54 year old war veteran with a damaged kidney. Tanwar did occasionally talk about donating her organs but had not formally made the pledge. Her son and other family members deserve kudos for going ahead with the decision nonetheless, and not sentimentally insisting on a hindu cremation and worrying about divine merit and all that rubbish. Now how many of us would be inspired by her example and come forward to donate our organs after our death? Very few, if not absolutely none. Similarly, very few, too few, among us would actually be able to do a Bindra. My point ,therefore, is let us also celebrate Tanwar and her family, for they too have managed to effectively overcome an enormously powerful mental barrier. Why don’t we think of some sort of incentive for organ donors so that more of them find it worthwhile to come forward and help medical research and treatment? Can we, for instance, promise the family free treatment for life in a superspeciality hospital, for say 20 years? I know we shall never take such a step, because taking our family to Beijing will certainly get us much more publicity.
But the trustees of a trust that has decided to train first generation educated tribals for BPO jobs in the interiors of rural Gujrat must have been different. When I say ‘tribals’ I mean men and women who otherwise struggle to make ends meet, but with the promise of a better dawn, do not mind undertaking 25 kilometer journeys back and forth everyday, some with their husbands and some others after cooking and dispatching their husbands and children to their respective schools and workplaces. Some of then are actually wearing T shirts and trousers for the first time in their whole life and yet most of them have been safely cruising towards the completion of the course, and hundreds more have registered for the next batch. I recall a speaker, a university professor, in a seminar a year ago, lamenting about some inherent cultural reservations of the poor and tribals for which they reportedly refuse to avail of assistance from government and well meaning organizations. He may have faced some such experience himself, for I knew he was genuinely concerned and certainly not lying but I am not sure if his observations can be generalized and I wish he reads today’s newspaper. No I am not going to take it to him, I am not that sort of a chap.
To return to where I began, I do not really know which of these three events that took place yesterday, broadly speaking, is the fittest to be designated as a good enough—or rather the best—‘take off’ moment. I am plain confused as to which of these will change India like never before, and in another day or two, send me or you up over the moon, or remove hunger from this land for ever. Frankly, I suffer from no delusion about the level of my IQ and all sorts of help are welcome. Let me meanwhile leave you with this funny reaction of people when they suddenly saw the Indian contingent going wild with celebration on hearing that Bindra had won gold. Fully grown men and women, a report said, were seen singing and dancing rapturously in the middle of the stadium, and athletes and officials from other countries were staring at them with utter bemusement. How would they know, went ahead the breathless reporter, how this single piece gold matter so much to so many people back in India? In this I am sorry to confess that I am not one of these so many people and would rather side with those bemused foreigners. That said, my saying sorry probably also means that I am actually utterly confused. But I am happy that I am.
Postscript: A day after I released the post, newspaper reports suggest that our government as well as Lakshmi Mittal's sports trust had spent huge amounts behind Bindra's personal staff and training in Germany. His father, predicatably, felt no need to give the quote-famished journos the figure that he might have parted with. He clearly had no business claiming credit for his son's success because he did not need to. Even if we accept the government shelled out a fortune to Bindra after 2006 when he became the world champion, it does nothing to alter my core point that the system did not produce the champion that he is today. I am glad that I am not part of this mad race to fete him, unlike the state governments of states to which he does not belong. This reminds me of the Kerala government felicitatiing or offering some cash reward to Robin Utthappa after India won the T20 world cup last year ostensibly because his mother belonged to the state. Pity Bindra's mother does not belong to Bihar so they will have to think of some other, more ingenuous excuse. Let the credit-claimers continue to try to outdo each other and let us learn to accept hard facts. Bindra is a great champion but he remains outstanding, in all senses of the word.
2 comments:
Only after the last tree has been cut down. Only after the last river has been poisoned. Only after the last fish has been caught. Only then will you realise that money cannot be eaten. The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.
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Angelinjones
WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING
i must say i'm slightly amused at this response. i never thought my blog could be read as a defence of environment as well as of the minorities. i'm glad that people i don't know are discovering dimensions in my writing that i did not consciously set out to incorporate.
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