What after Olympics?

18% of the world’s population and not even 0.8% of the total Olympic medals and we are very happy & cheering on the biggest feat of medals till now. Six medals do seem like a rich haul for a nation that has been happy just to participate. Olympics are over and we will get over the fleeting ecstasy generated by each of these handful medals. There will be lots of people including me who will whack our sporting authorities for being poorly administered, blame our spending on sports, and criticize how we treat our sports stars (I still couldn’t believe that India sent Mr. Bachan for the Olympic Torch bearing ceremony) and then…. And then we will forget until next games…….

The supporting authorities & the failed Governments have also devised excellent ways of fooling people. As soon as a sports person wins a medal different state governments and departments start showering money on them that too crores. And mind it; these are the same governments which do not have enough money to provide food, water, shelter, roads, education to its people. This culture of rewarding the already rewarded is sick.

I am not writing this to undermine the great performance of the athletes at the London Olympics. They deserve attention and praise. But the funny thing is that before the Games began, nobody gave a fair chance to these players. Instead of showering money on them after winning medals, Government should spend money on the sports and sportspersons before they went to qualify for those events; they should be given good facilities, proper diet, good permanent income to sustain their livelihood. But before these games all the focus was on the glamour boys and girls of Indian sports who have won some medals in the past, and they failed this time I will say only because of the media pressure. And now all the attention being given to players like Vijay Kumar and Mary Kom, is not because we want to recognize their talent and appreciate the sacrifices they and their families have made to reach where they have now despite all the miserable conditions which our country put them into. We're applauding them because as a nation we are desperate for medals and Vijay, Mary and others have given us a false hope that we are a rising power in sports but we are not…..

No country has performed well in sports without taking care of the basic needs of its people. In India where majority of the public don’t have access to clean drinking water, where almost all the people are without regular supply of electricity (here I am not considering Madam ji and electricity spent on her Robots), where public is without good healthcare system, where the poverty line set by the government is 28Rs/Day (Yes, we can only laugh at it) and its better if we don’t talk about the access to the playgrounds and sporting facilities. How do we expect to do well in sports? Even the present number of medals is a miracle.

The Games are over and again there would be power-grid failures, fights for drinking water, Traffic Jams, shortage of food because of poor monsoon, Floods in Mumbai because of heavy monsoon. Despite all the economic growth of the last decade we are still world’s most malnourished country, yes even worse than the African countries. One in every three malnourished children in the world lives in India. But, for a reason beyond comprehension, instead of worrying about this lopsided development, we seem to celebrate it.

A long medal tally in Olympics does not make a country great, instead only a great country can stretch their medal tally to the top. And please don’t fathom that India is a great country (I won’t buy it if you again start debating on culture and all that), in no way it is. While we the general people continue our obsession with the Olympic medals, there are plenty of Indians who would continue to loose a million battles every day. And till the time we don’t care about these basic things, we will remain pretty much at the bottom of the Olympics medals heap.

Give us good living; we will give you good medal count.