Passionate About India

I really had decided to not write about the Commonwealth Games at all – the reason is clear in the heading and I will elaborate soon enough! However, receiving too many mails and requests asking me write on the games, finally made me change my mind! But I do not plan to write about all the corruption related allegations, as too much has been said by senior journalists in the most hard hitting manner already. Also, for everything in India, we have a scam. How could one ever expect that the government will plan such a huge project without makingmoney? I will end my reference to the scam by sighting one of the many sms messages on CWG that I received a couple of days back. It stated, “What a lovely anagram (word play)... Unscramble ‘Sir, u made lakhs,’ and you get ‘Suresh Kalmadi’... !!!” Leaving the scam behind on that note, let me tell you why I detest the very idea of the Commonwealth Games. Of course, I agree with Manishankar Iyer wholeheartedly when he says that instead of spending s...

but for an equally irresponsible board and a self-centered political class! From the heights of magnificent popularity to the depths of controversies – the game of cricket is going through its roughest patches. The recent betting and match-fixing scandal surrounding the Pakistani cricket team is not only a sad denunciation of the most popular sport, but a huge betrayal for those millions of cricket lovers who swear by the names of cricketers. The latest allegations of match-fixing and spot-fixing by Pakistani cricket players brought back with itself the horrors of the early 2000 match-fixing scandal. The whole belief and pacification about match-fixing getting buried in pages of history (after the year 2000 fixing scandal was exposed) seem to have resurfaced as bigger monsters this time. It was the same match-fixing issue that ensured a life ban being slapped on the South African captain, Hansie Cronje, who later mysteriously died in an air crash. The same happened to the erstwhile cel...

My heart goes out for Mumbaikars! They face the worst of crisis time and again, despite being in the midst of plenty. Mumbai is our industrial capital and India’s richest live there. People come to Mumbai from all parts of India with dreams in their eyes to strike it big. Not that all of those dreams come true – 40% live in the slums of Mumbai. Yet, many strike it big and dreams do get fulfilled. More importantly, everyone is on the move and working hard – rich or poor. It’s in their culture. But then, from blasts to water clogging, issues just keep testing them and trying to slow them down – the latest one being their unending month-long water crisis, which is hitting everyone in the city, rich or poor. In the biggest and swankiest of buildings, there is hardly any water and people are now going to work very often without taking bath. Water comes from tankers and that too for a few hours only. The whole day, taps have no water. Tankers too are not easily available and there are offic...

The year when India is going to host both the Commonwealth Games as well as the World Cup Hockey championships couldn’t have started in a more unfortunate way. The first is of course the fracas revolving around the strike of the Indian hockey players and their refusal to play till the time their arrears were paid. While the governing body known as Hockey India was quick to literally term the players unpatriotic and accuse them of putting money before the essence of playing for India, what was appalling was not only the fact that the arrears (running into lakhs) of the said hockey players had not been paid for a long duration, but also that Hockey India actually offered a pittance of Rs 25,000 for each player in lieu of the arrears. And this too was offered to them only with the condition that either the striking players accepted it or left the conditioning camp within 48 hours. Needless to say, the authorities were perhaps thinking that it would be easy for them to lure junior players ...

AT A TIME WHEN IT IS NOT ABLE TO GUARANTEE RETURNS TO THE OWNERS? Unlike last year, this year’s IPL is in the news for all together a different set of reasons. Now that it has already been declared (assuming this decision to be the final one, without further change) that this season’s IPL would take place in South Africa, it is time for India to take stock of what she has lost and what not on account of this decision. But before that it is even more pertinent to question why IPL organisers accepted this in the first place? Is it that they are deliberately trying to run away from hosting the event in India, using the general elections as an excuse? And considering the fact that general elections should be given topmost priority, was it so very challenging to postpone the event by some time, and hold it later on in all the states? Why is there so much hurry to force upon a decision, and that too, to host one of the most popular sporting properties of India outside India? Is it that the o...

The winning of the gold medal by Abhinav Bindra in the Beijing Olympics, 2008, is indeed a matter of great pride for not just the sports loving people of this country but also for every Indian. It is special to me for three key reasons: firstly, the triumph of this young man with a childish innocence has literally brought India out of the notional apartheid and a sort of Below Poverty Line (BPL) status it had had for long in the global sporting arena. His win assumes a larger than life status, considering the fact that never ever in the 112 years of Olympics’ history has any Indian athlete won an individual gold medal; the last gold medal we had earned was in the team event of hockey, and that too 28 years ago! The other reason that makes Abhinav’s feat so special to me is that after watching the India contingent walking past during the inaugural ceremony, I was so filled with shame that I had almost given it a zero chance of anything close to even a single gold – something that’s so h...

The Olympics has always been an event when people across the world keep aside their personal vendetta, forget for sometime the permutations of geopolitics, and gather to enjoy one of the greatest uniting factors of mankind, i.e. sports. Yet, this time, when the Olympics are being staged in China, people across the world are waiting more to see whether China can pull it through successfully, than for anything else. And probably never before in Olympic history has there been a ‘host versus the rest’ phenomenon as much as is clearly present this time. No prizes for guessing that if China doesn’t succeed in pulling it through, not too many people would be unhappy. In the last few years, since China was selected for hosting the 2008 Olympics, the country looked upon this event not as an opportunity to bridge the remaining gaps with the rest of the world, but as a perfect opportunity to flaunt ‘the China way’. And this attitude is evident – right from the construction of a larger than life a...

The Indian Premier League Twenty 20 (IPL T20) is finally over. And it ended in the most spectacular manner one could ever imagine in any form of sport – the team which came into the tournament as least favourites and as underdogs, finally grabbed the trophy in a clincher! In fact, when the IPL was about to commence, I was very apprehensive about the success of the entire event. For I believed, that for a nation which has no history of club culture, to accept IPL – which was based on a club format – was a challenge in itself. Moreover, in India, where cricket is like a religion and players of Team India are almost like demi-Gods, to be accepted by fans to play against each other in a club format, was another challenge. Thirdly, after the debacle of the Indian Cricket League (ICL), which was almost on a similar format, the success of IPL was looking grim. But the manner in which IPL happened, completely shook up the entire nation. IPL’s success has been primarily on account of the manner...

India is a pot of crabs. Though blessed by the birth of brilliant individuals, India has forever been beset by insecure power brokers steeped in mediocrity who always feel threatened by these brilliant individuals. As a consequence, Indian history in every sphere has been witness to umpteen examples of heroic visionaries being pulled down by a system that felt threatened by the individual’s growth. Be it a Subhas or a Bhagat, an Ambani or a Bajaj, they were all forsaken by a system that should’ve nurtured them. In spite of this, they might’ve persevered and realised their visions in whatever measure possible, but that is besides the point. The point is that the same, irritatingly familiar phenomenon is painfully evident in the manner in which the BCCI is handling India’s World Cup debacle. First things first – Greg Chappell’s gone and thank god for small mercies. The high-handed Australian ruined every team he touched as a coach and it proved to be no different for the Indian team. He ...