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From
Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 31, Dated 04 Aug 2012 |
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| CULTURE & SOCIETY |
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OLYMPICS |
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The gold quest
India is poised for its greatest ever medal haul in a summer Olympics. Publishers are looking to take advantage by rushing out sports-specific titles. Two in particlar have whet Shougat Dasgupta’s appetite
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Will she, won’t she? Mary Kom is one of India’s brightest medal prospects
Photo: Garima Jain |
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OUR SIGNALLY inglorious sporting history dips to its lowest ebb each Olympics, as we are confronted by our inability to compete not just with the superpowers of world sport — the US, the former Soviet Union, Germany, Britain or China — but almost anyone at all.
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Olympics: The India Story
Boria Majumdar, Nalin Mehta HarperCollins India
India 304 pp; Rs 695 |
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Iran and North Korea each have won more than twice as many medals as us, having competed in the same number of summer Games combined. Turkey has four times as many medals; smaller countries such as Jamaica and Kenya, with their sprint and distance running superstars, dwarf our medal totals; Mexico, Argentina and South Africa, even countries the size of Ireland, Portugal and Morocco have won more medals, often dozens more.
And our medal total is inflated by the success of our dominant hockey team, which won six gold medals from 1928 to 1956, eight of India’s nine golds and 11 of 20 total medals won in 22 editions of the summer Olympics. Since I began watching as a boy in 1984, India has won, in six Olympiads leading up to Beijing, a dispiriting total of two bronze medals and one silver. It is a dismal, shaming record, not so much underachieving as simply not achieving.
Of course, numbers don’t tell stories and even if India’s Olympic history lacks the glitter of medals, it is a long, involved history. “[S]tories of failure on the Olympic stage,” writes Boria Majumdar in the preface to his and Nalin Mehta’s updated edition of their 2008 book Olympics: The India Story, “often for reasons unconnected to sport, help us understand post-colonial India better.” Sport and modern nation-building can seem inextricable. To the cynical among us, it can seem the bandwagon-jumping politicians and media appropriating individual or team victories are more opportunistic than patriotic. But after Independence, as India sought to assert nationhood, Majumdar and Mehta write, “the Olympics came to symbolise something deeper than a simple test of athletic skills. It was about identity and equality as much as it was about westernisation and modernity.”
This is in a fascinating middle chapter of Olympics, in which Majumdar and Mehta lay bare Nehru’s ambitions for an Asian Games, “intrinsically linked to the larger Indian self-image of being a major Asian power and the Nehruvian idea of India’s centrality in a new global order.” International sport is an opportunity to announce yourself to the wider world. India’s failures at the Olympics, particularly in individual events, cut deep enough for Rohit Brijnath, described by Majumdar and Mehta as “one of India’s finest sport writers”, to rhapsodise thus about Leander Paes’ bronze medal in 1996, breaking a 44-year duck: “In 20 years of sports writing, no player has done what he did to me. On the day… as he battled stuttering form to win bronze, the strangest thing happened. I cried.” “A nation of a billion,” Brijnath, in splendid hyperbolic fettle, continued, “had been tired of mediocrity, had waited so long, 44 years at that point, for one more individual Olympic medal, just to show we belong, to feel briefly empowered.”
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Reading the Games
By Aradhana Wal
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India at the Olympic Games |
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INDIA AT THE OLYMPIC GAMES
Sandhya Rao, Priya Krishnan, Deeya Nayar
This little book tells the grand story of the Olympic Games, from ancient Greece to London 2012. Aimed at children eight years old and above, this is a basic introduction through anecdotes and the history of landmark events and athletes.
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India’s Olympic Story |
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INDIA’S OLYMPIC STORY
Sudarshan Narayanan, Vishal Matthew, Sattwick Barman, Sandhya Rao
Another book for children, this more comprehensive read traces the accomplishments of Indian athletes at the Olympic Games. The second half includes the Paralympics. The book is bolstered by cartoons and photographs from the Abhinav Bindra Foundation.
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Saina Nehwal: An inspirational Biography |
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SAINA NEHWAL:
AN INSPIRATIONAL
BIOGRAPHY
TS Sudhir
Saina Nehwal is a badminton
prodigy, sports
celebrity and one of the best athletes
Indian sports has going for it. Journalist
TS Sudhir’s debut book tracks
the story of a small-town girl in a
cricket-obsessed nation, who went
on to become a champion.
Aradhna Wal is a Sub-Editor with Tehelka.
aradhna@tehelka.com |
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BUT MAJUMDAR and Mehta’s book was first published in 2008, before the modest revolution of Beijing, in which India achieved an unprecedented haul of three medals, including a first individual gold, which was followed up with Commonwealth success (on the field) and further consolidation in the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou. This means a new story might have to be written, a story no longer focussed on failure and administrative cock-ups but sporting success.
In their new chapter in the reissue, in time for the London Games, which may have just begun by the time you read this, Majumdar and Mehta title a sub section ‘Lessons from Bhiwani: Demystifying the Revolution’. One of India’s two individual bronzes, to accompany Bindra’s gold, came in the boxing ring but that solitary medal masks the defeat of a Russian world champion by a cocksure, young Indian fighter, Akhil Kumar, who was then upset himself when a medal seemed certain. “Bhiwani,” write Majumdar and Mehta, in their avuncular style, “from being a shantytown, suddenly turned into the cynosure of all attention.”
Shamya Dasgupta, in his book Bhiwani Junction, tells the extraordinary story of a dusty, easily forgotten Haryana town that has been producing boxing greats since the heavyweight Hawa Singh, who won consecutive golds at the Asian Games in 1966 and 1970. Vijender Kumar’s Olympic bronze, his world No 1 ranking, the 2010 Asian Games gold, combined with his matinee idol looks, have made boxing India’s hottest sport, already vying, Dasgupta says, with football for distant second behind cricket. Dasgupta is a sharp, enterprising reporter. His book, perfunctory in places, is elevated not just by his obvious passion for boxing but by the pleasure he takes in the company of his interviewees, the young boxers in Bhiwani and the national centre in Patiala who are transforming Indian sport. “The Indian Sock Exchange,” Dasgupta notes in conclusion, employing a pun of which he is a little too fond, “is set to soar — if only its administrators seize the moment.”
That cautious rider tells a sorry story of its own: administrative negligence, politicking and systemic failure is the story of Indian sports, looming larger in the public consciousness perhaps than any medal-winning athlete. International sporting events seem less of an opportunity for Indian athletes to show their mettle than for our administrators to prance and mince on foreign shores. It’s understandable then that Dasgupta devotes a substantial part of Bhiwani Junction to investigating spats between coaches or politicians in charge of governing bodies; for a journalist, this is irresistible stuff but a boxing fan might have wanted more about the fighters themselves. I would even have settled for longer descriptions of important fights. The voices of the boxers are so engaging and Dasgupta’s own enthusiasm so apparent that it’s a pity he chooses to eschew the locker room for the pettiness upstairs.
Dasgupta’s book may not be a comprehensive history of boxing in India, in the manner of Majumdar and Mehta’s volume on India’s Olympics history, but it performs an equally valuable function: it shows that books can be written about sports other than cricket with a fan’s devotion, a fan’s love. He has set a path in which I hope others follow.
Shougat Dasgupta is an Assistant Editor with Tehelka.
shougat@tehelka.com
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