Jokes Apart | Kheloge, koodoge, banoge nawab: Is the era of the lone wolf over in India’s sporting culture?

In the beginning, there was the sack race. For Indians of a certain vintage, this was our introduction to sports in school. I always wondered where all the sacks came from. Some kirana grocery stores were making a killing. There was a designated ‘sports day’, which involved marching left, right, left to a monotonous drum beat, and doing coordinated PT. The most coveted job was that of the drum- beater because then one could avoid flapping one’s arms in army unison. Facilities were dire, even in so-called ‘good’ schools. One played football with the same cork ball (called ‘corket’ in Allahabad) one played cricket with. For shoes, one wore the same hard leather Naughty Boy shoes that one wore to class. Every tackle meant more bruising of the ankles. Then there was kabaddi, another low investment sport, even cheaper than the sack race (the Pro Kabaddi League has seriously come a long way). One needed no help from the impoverished school sports store, which, like the books in the library, was kept under lock and key. Our school bags made a dividing line, two teams were formed on the spot, and off we went into enemy territory muttering ‘baddi baddi baddi’. And then, once we passed out of standard eight, we stopped playing. Preparation began in earnest for the dreaded Boards and competitive exams. Playing was for children and we were now preparing for the adult world. Underlying it was that old clichéd adage repeated by every school teacher: ‘Kheloge koodoge hogey kharab/ Padhoge likhoge banoge nawa.’ Post school, once you’d made it to your institution of choice, the most popular game in college hostels was volleyball. And carrom. There ended the Indian middle class’s tryst with sports. Unless one happened to come from a wealthy background, in which case one could enter the deadening world of Gymkhana sports, where bearers doubled as ball boys, and one could die in pleasant obscurity on the tennis or squash courts, without having left a scratch on the city, state, national or international scene. I’m not exaggerating. The other day I met a bearer from the Dehradun Club who told me, ‘Khurana saab tennis khelte khelte khatam ho gaye.’ In my late twenties, I taught at a posh boarding school for boys, which boasted of all the facilities in the world, and emphasised sports over academics, but eventually failed to produce any sportsperson of note. This holds true of most colonial-era private boarding schools.

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To be sure, we had sporadic moments of glory on the world stage: Ramesh Krishnan outsmarting a bewildered Mats Wilander with some ‘touch tennis’ at the Australian Open; PT Usha losing by one hundredth of a second at the 1984 Olympics; and Anju Bobby George long-jumping to glory 20 years ago. When Sania Mirza was doing well, fly by night tennis academies sprang up overnight across the country. Along the way, we’ve had wrestlers, badminton players, the odd boxer, the odd shooter. Indian sports has been mostly down, but never out. Which brings us to today. The difference between then and now is that the recent achievements in our sporting culture are happening simultaneously, and across disciplines. The second point is that there is more than one individual involved in each of these disciplines. The era of the lone wolf is over. A piece I read recently made a curious observation. Written by an Indian, it emphasised the point that chess suits the ‘Indian psyche’, since it requires minimum physical exertion. If a non-Indian had written it, we would have screamed racism. As if to prove the writer wrong, a few days later, Neeraj Chopra recorded a best effort of 88.17 metres to become the world champion in the men’s javelin throw. At times, the prejudices are embedded deep in our own ‘psyche’. If we look at chess, it’s not just eighteen-year-old R Praggnanandhaa, who recently returned home to Chennai to a hero’s welcome. Apart from him, four Indians advanced to the quarter finals of the World Cup, securing 50 per cent of the available slots. Seven Indians feature in the top twenty junior players in the world. Not even 20 years of age, players like Arjun Erigaisi, Raunak Sadhwani, Nihar Sarin and Gukesh D are at the forefront of a generational shift in Indian chess. Pragg, unlike Vishwanathan Anand, is not alone. Ditto for javelin. Neeraj Chopra, who won the gold at Budapest, unlike Sania Mirza in the past, is not waging a lonely battle for supremacy. The other two Indians in the fray, Manu DP and Kishore Kumar Jena, finished at a respectable sixth and fifth spots respectively. And then came that historic relay race in the World Championships. Sporting achievement is incremental and not about instant medal gratification. Muhammed Janas, Amoj Jacob, Muhammed Ajmal Variyathodi and Rajesh Ramesh finished fifth, a major improvement on their twelfth place finish at the last edition. Indians being Indians, ever ready to dispense unsolicited advice about things they have no idea about, gave the team an earful. Speaking about the previous Championships, Ramesh told a newspaper, ‘We were trying to hide our faces at the airport. Random people, whom we had never met before, started giving us running tips.’ The Indian quartet now enters the Asian Games as favourites to win gold. They already hold the new Asian record. They’ve broken the 3-minute mental barrier. There have been other Indian moments. In Budapest, Parul Chaudhary established a new national record in the 3,000-metre steeplechase event and qualified for the Paris Olympics in 2024. Over in Copenhagen, Indian shuttler HS Prannoy secured a bronze in the badminton World Championships, ensuring India’s record of having at least one medallist in the showpiece event since 2011. Add to that the Indian team’s victory in the finals of the South Asian Football Federation Championship earlier this year — India’s year in sport doesn’t look bad at all. In fact, it’s quite the moment.

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India’s moon landing, combined with unprecedented sporting success, makes for an irresistible brain and brawn combo. But, remember, this was the combo adored by communist countries: supremacy in space and sport. At one level, it sounds tacky and retro. And yet, it’s not the same. India’s space explorations are for the benefit of the human race, for peaceful purposes. Ours are not pointless prestige projects of the Cold War era. Our scientists, like our sportspersons, have worked hard in their individual capacities, surmounting odds and obstacles. Another difference from communist countries is that our sporting achievements are not based on cruelty. For instance, the gymnastic achievements of Romania and China were/are based on an inhuman win-at-all-costs national pride model, which in turn is based on inhuman training methods, where children were forced into training factories at a tender age. Our sporting icons come from a place of blood, sweat and tears, but also joy. The world is not being forced to take notice by hook or by crook (as during the Cold War); it’s happening on its own, organically. During the chess World Cup, an Irish friend, a chess aficionado, sent me a screenshot of the four Indians in the quarters, ‘Man, what’s up with the Indians and chess!’ And we Indians can totally relate to our new heroes. We identify with Pragg’s mom carrying a pressure cooker and spices, to make rasam and rice while he plays in faraway lands. We get it when relay anchor Rajesh Ramesh talks about his previous job as a ticket checker at Trichy platform, when he let passengers off with a warning, while his colleagues complained that he didn’t issue enough challans. You see, genuinely talented sportspersons are creative people; the last thing that interests them is the exercise of petty authority.

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However, a note of caution. We are on our way, but the eagle hasn’t landed. Okay, some eagles have, but not as many as one would like to and are capable of. Pursuing an elite sport is no joke. We are not a wealthy nation. A survey conducted by the Australian Sports Foundation concluded that almost 50 per cent of that country’s top athletes earn below the Australian poverty line threshold. Two in three elite athletes have considered quitting their sport. The costs are enormous: travel, accommodation, coaching, equipment, not to mention that elite athletes live in the real world where they have to pay rent and put food on the table after their careers are over. The rise of India’s gen next in chess, for instance, is also the story of how the parents have made enormous financial sacrifices. The government and corporate sponsors need to do more. The second sobering thought is to do with the state of sports administration in the country. We’ve seen how our women wrestlers have been treated. In the latest turn of events, United World Wrestling, the body that controls world wrestling, has suspended the Wrestling Federation of India for failing to conduct elections. Indian wrestlers can participate in world events but they cannot wear the tricolour emblem, and if they win, they will have to take the podium minus the national flag and anthem. Shame! Our sports federations are in deep rot. It brings us to that old point: do Indians achieve what they do despite India? Last year, FIFA suspended India, again for not holding elections. The same holds true for the International Olympic Committee and the International Hockey Federation who threatened to ban their corresponding Indian bodies for the same reasons. Three years ago, the government, under international pressure, withdrew recognition of more than 50 federations for not complying with the Sports Code, while the high court admonished 24 bodies for transgressing rules. Sports officials and babus are the biggest enemies of sport in our country. And why are netas of all shape, size and hue so invested in the power politics of sport? Finally, there’s one more change I would like to see. Owing to India’s size, for reasons cultural and otherwise, advertent or inadvertent, we’ve developed region-wide ‘specialisations’. For example, wrestlers come mostly from Haryana, chess players from the South, and so on. It would be nice if we mixed it up a little. The writer is the author of ‘The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolour Youth’, and the editor of ‘House Spirit: Drinking in India’. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views. Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.