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Shobhaa De’s “Rio jao. Selfies lo” comment has touched a raw nerve in most Indians, especially sportsmen and sports lovers. No sooner did she tweet her caustic comment, there was a maelstrom of protests from all quarters — the most vociferous and outraged were some on the Indian team to the Rio Olympics.
Their reaction was something on these lines: Who on earth is a socialite to question the hard work, dedication and perseverance that Indian sportspersons put into their respective specialised disciplines before competing in international events such as the Olympics?
While their outrage is understandable, De’s acerbic comment raises some key questions: Why are Indians third-raters in sports other than cricket? What do they lack that their counterparts in Western countries possess and excel in? What explains their pathetic performance?
No other country that takes part in the Olympics makes as much noise about its participants as India. The Indian media is agog with the splendid exploits of its athletes at home, but there is a collective sigh of anguish when the sportsmen and sportswomen make early — and humiliating — exit from each of the disciplines.
We tend to make champions out of distinctly inferior athletes when, in a country of 1.25 billion, what we really are world champions is in dishonesty and fraud. We are the gold standard. The putative benign arena of national sports too has been tainted by corruption and nepotism.
No Collective Reflection
Vilification of our athletes is immediately followed by shrill, emotional and bleeding-heart counter-protests. There is little collective reflection on why year after year we progressively tend to go down the global ladder of sporting achievement.
And to console ourselves, we go back to what Nehru said of the Olympics — winning medals was not important, but what mattered was to participate. Well, in that case we might as well describe ourselves as ‘also ran’. What we refuse to recognise is that as sport has come to reflect more and more a corporate/commodity model, it has become more like work than play.
In a realist world, in which competition and the competitive spirit is the essence, winning medals may not be akin to display of belligerence but is certainly an indicator or measure of infrastructural growth and the attention we pay to the institution of sports or, for that matter, soft power. The Indian media have no doubt turned the spotlight on global sporting events such as the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, but that has been done to rake in advertisement revenues.
No Sporting Culture
At the heart of our routinely dismal performance at the Olympics, the world’s greatest sporting extravaganza, is culture. India has never had a sporting or winning culture. From the early days, a largely agricultural society afforded little time for leisure or sport. The only event that came close to sport was game hunting with bows and arrows. The Mughals, for instance, encouraged riding, pigeon racing, kite flying, polo and chess.
Once the British settled down to rule India, after prolonged periods of war and spoliation, the sahibs popularised polo in the military cantonments, besides, of course, cricket before they turned their attention to football.
The wrestling akharas in Haryana and parts of Uttar Pradesh remained beyond British patronage. But as Ronojoy Sen writes in Nation at Play: A History of Sport in India, the British were appalled by the “sedentary” Bengali whose “maxim being that ‘walking is better than running, standing than walking, sitting than standing and lying down best of all.’ ” But indolence and lack of a competitive spirit was — or is — hardly the sole preserve of the Bengali.
Sen writes that as cricket became popular with Western-educated scions of maharajas taking to the sport, the credit for India’s entry into the Olympic Games goes to Sir Dorabji Tata, Jamshedji Tata’s eldest son. Cricket and hockey thrived in the 1950s and 60s. But not much else. Corporate support for sports has remained pitiably low but that alone does not explain our traditional ineptness, incompetence and lack of skills and imagination.
Stratified Social Structure
Much has been written about India’s stratified social system and the lack of opportunity for members of lower castes in the sporting arena. Nothing can be farther than the truth.
Indian hockey, archery, football, field athletics and other sundry disciplines have been taken to national heights by the exploits of men and women from the lower castes and tribes. Amidst the larger narrative of dissent, distrust and division, they have shone nationally and briefly flickered internationally — a bronze medal here, a silver there — before falling into the abyss of anonymity.
While social exclusion of blacks has been and continues to be deep in the Western world, they have historically and consistently raked in the golds and the silvers and the bronzes at the Olympics and other international sporting tournaments for their respective countries. In Brazil and Argentina, the best footballers spring from the favelas or slums while the wilds of Kenya and Ethiopia produce the most outstanding long-distance runners.
Education Over Sports
The lack of a sporting culture is reinforced by the argument that Indian society traditionally lays more stock on youth educating themselves sufficiently to find jobs as sources of livelihood. Sports is treated as a “period” in school and even when kids show some promise in, say football or athletics, parents usually jump in to actively discourage greater participation. There is a saying in Hindi which goes like this: kheloge kudoge to honge kharab, padhoge likhoge to banoge nawab (your life will be wasted if you play, but you may become a king if you study).
Sports, within the Indian cultural milieu, is a strict no-no because it does not ensure a “steady income” in the long-run. In hugely-populated China, however, there are national programmes on talent spotting and training potential athletes from a young age. And, of course, there is world class infrastructure which is woefully inadequate in India.
No High Quality Training
Genetics does play a part but it is not enough to make an athlete reach the top.
To reach that upper limit requires hard work, extensive and intensive training, dedication and proper nutrition which Indian athletes do not have access to or are not imbued with.
This focus alone could create and sustain superior performance but what Indians lack is determination and grit.
Coupled with this, instead of focusing on our comparative advantage in sports that come naturally to us — archery, wrestling, shooting and the like — we take part in all disciplines and end up right at the bottom. Such specific attention would give Indian athletes a competitive advantage over rivals from other countries.
But does anybody, least of all India’s sports officialdom and the myriad fixers, care? Sports bodies are headed and led by either politicians or babus who have their own axe to grind to stay put where nepotism brings its own rewards. The unsavoury drama involving wrestler Narsingh Yadav is a case in point. The other is the story about athlete Dutee Chand (who will be the first Indian athlete to take part in the women’s 100 metre dash) flying to Rio in economy class while some of the officials went in business class.
Also read:
Burn! Shooter Heena Sindhu Launches Scathing Attack on Shobhaa De
Why We Need to Stop Making a Big Deal of Shobhaa De Once & For All
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