A GoldMine?

This is quite unbelievable! An Olympic Gold, two days back. Now, we have won another football tournament! And even this was no ordinary tournament: this was the AFC Challenger's Cup. This means that India qualify for the Asia Cup, 2011 in Doha.

It’s a bit of a shame that we as a country have to celebrate qualifying for the Asia Cup, inspire of having won two Asian Games gold medals. But, keeping in mind the dearth of recent successes, there is reason enough to celebrate. However, things seem to be looking up now. 2 international tournaments in 2 years give us enough reason to be hopeful.

We will never be the giants in Asian football, leave alone the world stage (for that matter, any sport which is played at the world stage). But we can atleast ensure that our sporting teams don’t become the national embarrassments they were becoming in the recent past.

Sport has a huge influence on a nation’s psyche and morale, therefore on a nation’s culture. Strong sporting nations generally tend to be very hopeful and upbeat. How much sense this makes on the part of the people I am not sure. But point is that you, or I, or even the poorest person you know, fail to recognise that it is very unlikely that, no achievement of our national team (or an individual) will actually do us any material good. It’s just about feeling good at that moment, which does get carried over. And like in most other case in life, the bitter aftertaste of a loss is greater and lasts longer than the sweet taste of success. Women, however, show exceptionally good sense in these matters. They generally couldn’t be less bothered.

Sport can also serve to be an instrument for sparring between nations. “War minus the shooting”, as George Orwell would say. The Soviet Bloc recognized this fact all too well. It’s another matter that the means employed by them were far form advisable; the infamous doping experiments were shameful violations of both sporting conduct and humanitarian spirit. Not that the US teams were saints themselves. But I have to resign to the fact that history is mostly written by the winners, and anything else becomes a part of the sub-altern variants to it.

Getting back to India: let’s just hope that we continue, or start, to do well in sports which are played at the global level. And hopefully, we’ll also start doing better in sports played by 10 nations (or is it 9 now?).