On the eve of the Hockey World Cup, a TOI columnist asks, “Can India give its national sport a new lease of life?”
As I wondered in an earlier post, how or when was hockey ‘appointed’ our national game? And who, for that matter, selected our national bird, national animal, national fruit, national flower, etc? Were elections held? Were committees formed for this purpose? What were the criteria?
(An aside: Responding to the argument that Hindi was our national language because it was spoken by the most number of people in the country, C.N. Annadurai is supposed to have said, “If numerical strength is the criterion, the rat and not the tiger should be our national animal”.)
The Hindu calls itself India’s national newspaper. It has a right to call itself a national newspaper (as opposed to a regional one), but the words “India’s national newspaper” seems to imply that it was chosen from among many newspapers and conferred the title.
Anyway, I hope that I’ll soon be reading in India’s national newspaper that our team playing India’s national game has excelled.
haha very important questions .. they must have sat around a round table celebrating the writing of the constitution and when everyone was suitably drunk on scotch, old rajendra prasad would have started on this national thingy and then someone's secretary took that seriously and thus all this nonsense ..
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