I have always felt that we shouldn’t be getting into events such as the Olympics or even the Asian Games and needlessly pitting ourselves against the Americans, Russians and the Chinese. Why compete with the global best and then come back without a single medal and add to our inferiority complex?
What we should be doing instead is to participate in events where competition is from the likes of Bangladesh, Maldives and Nepal and knock the pants out of them. Which is what we seem to have done this week at the South Asian Games in Dhaka and hit jackpot.
With 10 gold, 12 silver and eight bronze they won on the penultimate day of competition in the South Asian Games being held at Dhaka, India now have 129 medals (67 gold, 40 silver and 22 bronze) reports the Times of India. You name the event – boxing, shooting, swimming, karate, taekwondo, table tennis, archery- India wrested or, rather, breasted a medal. How often do you see news reports such as this? Way to go.
Another thing we must do is to introduce events that are more suited to our physique and temperament. The Olympic motto of “Citius, Altius, Fortius” was not evolved keeping Indians in mind, and we shouldn’t make asses of ourselves by attempting to jump longer or higher, run faster or dive deeper.
What we should lobby for is an event such as “kicking the groin” contest. If you have watched “Paul Merton in India” on Fox History channel (which I did yesterday), you would have seen the interview with Mr Nayak who holds the Guinness record for withstanding the most number of kicks (43) on his groin. Nayak is now training his son too . Soon, I am sure he will be able to start his own academy and enroll a few hundred trainees. If this model can be replicated all over India, we’d have a basket size of a million people proficient in the sport of getting kicked on the groin. This would become a quintessentially Indian sport and we should be able to bag a few medals in various events, before the Chinese catch on and come up with their pirated version. “ The poor Indian may lack the resources to buy food grain, but he sure has good groin” would be the response of the awestruck rest-of-the-world.
Lady readers, kindly pardon the gender bias, as this sport will remain a male bastion, unless some disruptive technologies come into play in the future..
Raj - this one is a brilliant piece. With the next one on Bhajji...I think you must now focus your blogs on sports or related...Balaji...
ReplyDeleteyou know in school we used to have divisons based on our skill level in the sport - beginners, intermediate and seniors. We should have treams like this in the Olympics too. so we can take on nations in our own league and hope for some medals.
ReplyDeleteKicking the groin - isn't there a limit to what guinness book will count as a record? we should perhaps have a roti making contest for women - I am sure some of our rural women would roll out a thousand in 10 minutes.