India and Olympics

Being a proud citizen of India, I had accepted long ling time ago that Olympics is not for Indians. For that matter anything but cricket is not for India. I know it is sad but it is true. While I resided in India and Soviet Union was strong I was watching the medal tally to see how close will the Soviets get to USA now I like to see if USA can stay ahead of China in the final medal tally.

All was good till today morning when the radio station NPR decided to air a 3minute story on how poorly the 2nd most populous country in the world is doing in London Olympics. They focused specifically on the Indian field hockey team which apparently is performing the worst in the Indian Olympic history (not a single win). The story was true and as the usual style with NPR, a well balanced one and they had couple of interviews with fans and the editor of some local magazine in India and with the Australian born coach (really, here too we cannot find Indians to coach Indians?) of the Indian hockey team.

The story though true and I for years have accepted India and Olympics still made me squirm in my car seat. Needless to say, the reason was that some 3rd person is pointing to India and saying you guys should do better.

For once in my life I felt the pinch, it is time that we as a nation should do something about this. The story pointed out that the new hockey grounds played on artificial turfs are hard to afford for country like India, come on you got to be kidding me. A small hole in the BCCI coffers and we have one in every major city in the country. As is well known, I think we lack the political motivation to achieve this and don’t know how to get our so called elected leaders to act on this and make a difference.

If the argument is “if only cricket were in Olympics . . . . . . “, get real people we have won only 2 world cups of the 10 that have been played.