A tweet from Barkha Dutt got me musing on the fair-weather Indian psyche. Here we have a self-confessed feminist, one of the leading television anchors for one of the most viewed English news channels in India, talking about the lack of due Mary Kom gets in the media. Now THAT, pardon the pun, is smack-you-in-the-face hypocrisy. Now, Mary Kom has been around for very many years and has entered the twilight of her illustrious career. Criticize the government all you will, but they have at least recognized Mary Kom on an equal footing with all the other non-cricketing athletes that they’ve (mis)treated over the years: An Arjuna Award (2003), a Padma Shree (2006) and a Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award (2009) lace quite an impressive award cabinet.
To be fair to the media, they only pander to the high-majority lowest common denominator, who, let’s face it, couldn’t care less about Mary Kom or any other non-cricketing Indian athlete except for a brief episode during the quadrennial Olympic zeitgeist. Given our cumulative performance over the years, that only leaves us with an even more bitter and cynical view of sports. This has spiraled into the death of professional sports in India’s societal fabric today.
An English journalist with Reuters India, on twitter, wondered out loud why Saina Nehwal winning a bronze medal was such a big deal. I’m generally only an amused-bystander on twitter, but I did take exception to his tweet because he did not understand what it takes to be a sportsperson in this country.
The moment an Indian athlete is born, he/she has effectively diminished his/her chance of sporting success by a third. This can be attributed to, but is in no way restricted to, the distinct absence of sporting facilities and infrastructure, poor funding,the meager nutritional value of an Indian diet, the pitiable lack of world-class coaching and nutritional know-how, the general antipathy towards sports and of course the very many “Indian” factors like low per capita income, poor living standards and a lack of decent transportational mean, low availability of sporting equipment, non-existent international exposure, extreme climatic conditions (I could go on and on) that makes the everyday life of a person with a middle-class/lower middle-class background absolute hell. There are absolutely no factors, physical, mental, historical or geographic that give our athletes an edge over their international peers. The phenomenal effort that they have to expend only then gets them on-par with international competition.
Now contrast this with an athlete of Western or, lately of even, Far-Eastern origin. In the west, they predominantly come from a background which can only be described as upper middle class-to-rich by Indian standards. They don’t have to worry about the daily grind that takes a heavy physical and mental toll on the average Indian. Their basic infrastructure is world class. They have a finely tuned system to identify and nurture talent. In the east, China specifically, they have an Olympic program that identifies thousands of toddlers with potential and are put through a dictatorial training regime, with the single-minded goal of Olympic dominance that only a communist country can afford. They have access to world class facilities, highly intelligent, well trained and driven coaching staff and a general infrastructure that rivals the west. While both these cases don’t necessarily guarantee future Olympic success, the sheer number stacks the odds heavily in their favor.
Which is why, it is such an extraordinarily tale of success when an Indian athlete, more often than not from humble beginnings, is able to break free of these shackles and compete, successfully, at an international level. In the western world every one of these tales would be a celebratory narrative of an underdog’s perseverance in the face of incredible odds. The stuff that legends are made of.
I, for one, will be rooting for Mark Kom and all Indian athletes, not because of their nationality, but because of their ability to compete and succeed inspite of it.
On a related note:
Food for thought: It’s a well-known fact that India is the worst performing nation by population at the Olympics with an abysmal haul of 20 medals since 1900! Consider this though: The current per capita income stands at just over Rs. 50,000. It's also a given that an Olympic level athlete cannot afford to be poor by birth unless he/she is born in a communist country. If there were an Olympic-Poverty-Line, I'm willing to bet that the number of potential athletes who would fall above that line from India would equal the number of potential athletes from a tiny European nation like Latvia or Lithuania.
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