Our hockey coach Cravalho was the first one to come out of the closet . He lamented the plight of Hockey players who have came back after a stunning victory in the Asian Cup held in Chennai. He urged the players to go on hunger strikes for rewards and accolades. (Yes the Gandhian way) So the debate is back; do we recognize other sports in India other than cricket? we don’t and would not mind saying that we don’t bother about nay other sports. So is there a need to improve other sports than cricket? I am trying to figure out some answers to these questions.
Football, Hockey and Cricket – India won a cup each in three of these games in the past 3 months. Nehru Cup, Asian Cup and the 20-20 world cup. With the sheer interest of people in cricket – they grabbed the highlight. The monetary power of BCCI allowed them to give huge rewards to the cricket players and there it started. From all the corners came money for them – state governments, sponsors and the list go on. A player like Joginder Sharma is going to receive 21 lakhs from his state government. He should probably give up cricket and put the money in some FD so that his life is secure. Prabjot Singh who was instrumental in India’s win in the Asian Hockey championship went unnoticed, N.P. Pradeepan the midfielder of Indian football team who scored the single goal of the final against Syria in Nehru Cup also went unnoticed. Prabjot and Pradeepan failed to have a lasting imprint on the short memory of media. Many like Prabjot and Pradeep exist in India – badminton, Table Tennis, Chess, Fencing, there a lot of athletes and sports persons who wants to cut a career through different sports. We are not doing justice to them by ignoring them and showering prizes on the 20-20 team.
Cricket through it mass appeal has created lot of revenues for BCCI through TV rights, endorsements and so on. Not every sport can achieve all those but the undue importance given to cricket by our government, the ruling class and politicians is disgusting. People get attracted to different sports depending upon their physique and interest, it is very important for a country like India to promote its players and aspiring youngsters than inculcating a drab feeling that; you can only prosper or cut a career if you play cricket in India. Though the inefficiency of other sporting bodies were easily taken as an advantage by BCCI as cricket had mass appeal, the rest of the sporting bodies simply enjoyed the drift as they never gathered any attention. According to me, this media frenzy which was created around cricket helped many an associations to get away with their spurious method of working. In the license Raj times we pushed in as many bureaucrats as possible, who never had any prior experience in sports to govern these organisations which was headed by a politician. Irony is that, BCCI the supreme body of cricket in India still has a minister at its helm, but the constant media scrutiny rarely gives a hope for malfunctioning. These organisations which failed to work for 60 years still exist. It is hard to break those structures and reform the way of functioning but they have to be immediately demolished as the people at helm rarely hold any commitment towards the sport. For around 60 years went on making sports hostels and colleges all across the nations but ended up nurturing losers. Athletes, archers, badminton players, footballers all them never reached anywhere they wanted to. It is not because of their fault, it was the sheer incapability of the bureaucracy that worked behind them. Sports hostels right from Ladkah to Kanyakumari were failures and the players were treated with contempt and as a nation we could never repay for the immense talent they show cased. (Many of them have ended their lives too) The argument turns filthy; if you mean to say a nation with a population of a billion can’t win a single gold medal in the Olympics. Cricket, thank god is not there in Olympics, otherwise we would have been very happy and content in winning the gold medal for cricket.
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