India's Sports Culture, Destined To Be Poor

I have a hypothesis, and like all hypotheses, I will first make it and then back it up with something called ‘empirical evidence’. The said evidence is entirely my own reading and experience, and I am sure there would be many who believe otherwise. So let me start off by saying it aloud: India will rarely have a No. 1 team in cricket or any other sport.

And I am going to make a sacrilegious exemption here: I am not going to blame the government for not doing many things it ought to do. Some things you just need to accept as the reality and move on – something all Indians have done brilliantly in all other spheres of life, except sports.

Let’s first look at the number one dimension responsible for this: Indian Culture. We are a country obsessed with movies and masti. The youth of this country (and before people snicker, I must say I am 34 and truly qualified to call everyone around 25 as ‘youth’) don’t do sports. And not for a moment am I discarding the fact that there are several kids who are happily crowding the playgrounds, but that isn’t serious sports. Our neighborhood galli cricket culture is the epitome of masti. We are out there to have fun, and cricket or football or any other sport for that matter is just incidental. Perhaps, the true purpose of sport is pastime, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. However, such culture will never create no. 1 teams. The problem lies in the fact that not many of those masters of galli graduate into ‘season ball cricket’ or ‘club football’. On another note, is there any other sport that is subverted so enchantingly as cricket? From using tennis ball, to narrow lanes, to the legendary ‘one tappa out’ version, I believe no other sport has propagated so many mutant forms.

Our families don’t believe in something called family sports outing. Maybe the lack of proper facilities like good grounds with good sanitary arrangements are entirely lacking, but that doesn’t entirely absolve the potbellied fathers and the haggard mothers from their weekly excursions of dragging kids to the nearby cinema with daylight-robbery-priced popcorns followed by a couple of thousand worth of dinner with generous dollops of oil and cream. The family-sports is an alien concept here and the only physical activity we do with our folks is to walk to-and-fro between the car parking and homes. You will never have world’s no. 1 basketball team emerge from this kind of general lifestyle.

The damage of scoffing at or even dreading the option of kids choosing sport as a career can never be underestimated. This has very valid reasons. Everyone is pointing at the IPL as the source of great riches. It certainly is, but we have to remember that it is so for a very few and a select set of people. All put together, ten IPL teams can have at the most three hundred players, and not all of them are getting ‘sold’ like exotic slaves of the medieval era. Just look at that number: 300. With an approximate population of a hundred million kids (give or take), that’s a measly number to aspire to be part of. And our ancient survival instincts aren’t going to take such odds. While the young Indian fathers would never discourage their kids from pursuing a sport, even excellence at it, but if the kid says he won’t study for his SSC because he needs to practice hard for the weekly game, I am sure a spanking would ensue and the severely reprimanded kid would quickly abandon any thoughts of being the next Tendulkar.

If you look around and see the countries that are ruling the world of sports have rich sports culture. US, China, Japan, Australia, Britain, Germany, heck even the several countries in Africa with a GDP equivalent to my housing society’s annual income have amazing sports culture. And none of these countries are champions at just one sport and pathetic in others. Kids learn to be competitive and most importantly, stay fit and understand what ‘loosing’ means at a very early age there. As a result, they are very good when they compete at the highest levels. Sports academies are dime a dozen and fiercely promote sports.

So, in essence, it was a beautiful dream that an amazing bunch of men in Indian cricket achieved entirely on their own – being no. 1 in at least one sport. They were once in a hundred years band – Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, Kumble, Laxman, Sehwag and Zaheer. And sadly, they achieved that dream in the first decade of this century. After they are gone, India would soon assume normal service – of being third grade at sports in general and below average at cricket (test cricket i.e., the only form that matters).