Do Indian sports deserve better treatment?

We had a big argument at work on whether India recognizes other sport equally compared to cricket. Agreed, Cricket is major sport in India, but are we not recognizing other sports even if they do good? Do you think Ranji and Duleep Tropies get crowds, even in Cricket mad cities? If you look closely, Cricket is not popular in India - it is patriotism that is popular. Did you see what national recognition a single Bronze medalist Malleshwari got after Sydney Olympics? Even the 11 Gold Medalist Phelps didn’t get that much even in his native Baltimore. Or how about Sania Mirza and Leander Paes? How many nations keep track and celebrate the 50th and 100th ranked Tennis players? Or how about legendary PT Usha and Milka Singh? How many nations make a national heroine out of an athlete who has not won an Olympic gold? And a lot of great players in other fields like Vishwanathan Anand and Narain Karthikeyan are very well recognized.

So, its untrue that we are not recognizing other sports, and we have some special affection towards cricket. Honestly we given other sports enough chance and most nations don’t recognize the bronze winners and 100th ranked players like we do. We are plain pathetic in most sports and people don’t want to keep seeing a losing home nation. Would Cricket be so much of fun if we have 75 to 100 nations play competitively? Would an Indian still watch the sport after being routinely drabbed by 50 other sides consistently? This hockey victory is good, but the performance over the last 50 years is not enough for something that is recognized as a National sport.

Look at India – most Indians don’t care about the game or its funky rules, they just want India to win. Whether you score a cover drive with a straight bat or an edge beaten clear by an outswing it doesn’t matter. For Indians, Cricket is kind of a pain releaser where they want to see their fragile nation win in something. If India were winning so much in Ice-hockey, maybe they would watch that . It doesn’t require great marketing (Indian athletics didn’t do much marketing before PT Usha’s Athletic prowess in the Asiad) - it just require quality stuff. Without quality stuff, in the long run, product wont sell and that’s what most sports are finding now.

Seriously, India is pretty pathetic in most sports and probably recognition is a bit to blame. But, looking at whole of South Asia, it is peculiar region in the world where all countries are poor in most sports (that’s why we have SAARC games as Morale events). Africa, North America, Europe, South America, East Asia, Middle east are all good in atleast a couple of sports and are fiery in it – Olympic medals and Soccer World Cups are a good indicator. May be some researcher should start exploring the genetic makeup to see, why a poor South American or an African with probably as bad facilities are able to play well, while South Asians are not .

And to add further proof (or flame) immigrant Indians who have settled in Europe and North America have excelled in almost all fields – from winning Oscars to becoming a deans at institutions like CMU and Kellogg to becoming powerful board-members of most Corporations. But, even among immigrant Indians and overseas born Indians (who are grown in the same environment as other ethnics) we don’t have top soccer players or F1 champions or Olympic winners.

So are we sure recognition is the most to blame? I’m not saying that something is written in our gene that is setting the Boolean value for Sports to FALSE. But, we must sincerely start looking in and find out what our real problems and how we can solve them. Probably there are unique issues in our social culture that are not valuing sports and economical conditions are forcing people out of sports. Still looking at our big North neighbor winning so much medals (the only field India is not competing with China) with similar social values and economical constraints, I’m pretty frustrated.

60 Great years of freedom

What a great time for India to have its 60th birthday. Normally in India, 60th birthday would mark the passing of the retirement era where the old gives way to new. The day is celebrated pretty grand as a mark of recognition for the 60 great years of living. But, surprise for India it is more like a celebration of the first birthday. The nation is so young and so much of energy left in it, that the following years are going to be the most crucial and significant ones. Our basic problems like - rural decay, over dependency on Agriculture, adult illiteracy, poverty, gender inequality, inadequate buffer to face routine forces of nature like flood, cyclone and earthquake... have not changed much in the 60 years. We are still as divided as we started out with and the religious tensions have not smoldered. Thus, it will be the future that will be more significant for India than the immediate past. Most of the instrumentation to solve these colossal issues are getting available only right now.

In some aspects, we have not done bad and in fact done much more than expected. Who in the 1940's would have expected India to lead the world in Technology, software, satellite communication, etc? We are among the top 10 nations in economic size, stock market volumes, satellite capabillity, software production, super computing, nuclear generation... We would soon replace US as the country with the second most telephone connections after China and we are just couple of years behind the cutting edge technology in communication. This is a far cry from the days (just 7 to 10 years ago), when India had a place among world nations with the poorest teledensity and telephonic infrastructure. Our Television and Radio reach is complete and we have among the highest world viewers of Cable Television. We have produced some of the world's most respected educational institutions in Technology, Medicine and Management and Indian graduates go for a premium in international job markets. Tell that to someone who was sleeping for the last 20 years and he wont believe. Our film industry has matured enormously and is second only to the Hollywood in size and viewership.

There are cries of inequality and "rich-getting-richer". But, look around. How many rich people did you see in 1947 and how many do you see now? There are now atleast a 100 to 150 million credible middle class population dozens of times more than a couple of decades ago, and this class is rapidly bulging. While Indian companies were small dots in global picture, as late as 2003, now they are audacious enough to take on the world giants. Tata has gobbled our former colonial master's biggest steel maker and vying for Landrover and Jaguar, a car that transports English aristocracy. Reliance is hunting for GE's plastics division, the Pharma players are looking for big ticket acquisitions and companies like Bharat Forge and Moser Baer have reached the top in their fields. We had a handful of big corporations a decade ago. Now, you have Bharti, Infosys, Reliance, Ranbaxy, Tata Steel, Tata Motors, Wipro in every spectrum of production. Well done, India. We produce much more entrepreneurs than most other countries and our boys are there in the boardroom of every major company now. A few Giants like Vodafone and Pepsi have Indians at their very top. And this is not including Mittal who has built a world steel and energy empire almost single-handedly.

In 1940's our only rich people were the Maharajas and Zamindars who had squandered other's wealth and coasted on theis ancestors wealth generation. Now, the richest billionaire Indians - Lakshmi Mittal (Arcelor-Mittal), Ambani brothers (Reliance), Sunil Mittal (Bharti), Kushal Pal Singh (Real esate giant DLF), Azim Premji (Wipro) were almost nobodys 2 decades back, and almost built fortune with their own efforts (for Ambani brothers, a big start was provided their illustrious father). And there are thousands in the wings - just take a rough glance of the world's top B-schools and most of them have huge Indian contingent. Each huge company have a positive rippling effect on hundreds of thousands of people, and with so many huge companies thundering Indian economy never looked rosier.

Looking at the negatives, we have huge volumes of them. Take any social problem in the world, and India would rank top 10. Poverty, illiteracy, sectarian troubles, gender divides, class/caste issues, Communalism, Tuberculosis-Malaria-HIV-Polio, Corruption... our health care and primary education facilities are in great decay and rural India is almost sinking. In fact, we have come to the point where none of the major problems look very surprising. We are so used to glancing our morning newspapers where the headlines would have a major rail accident killing hundred people, terrorist gunning dozens in Assam or Kashmir, a major politician indicted in a big ticket scam and smilingly coming out of prison, floods drowning hundreds of villages or religious violence burning an entire city - these are just news points in a fast mesh of problems we face. We are now so insulated from our problems.

Thus, looking at our future, I would like to see these core problems solved before we rest on our laurels and enter the world's elite clubs. There is no use in just praising ourselves that we have IIT, IIM or AIIMS, when half of Indian kids dont go to school. There is no use in becoming a medical superpower when majority of citizens dont have access to proper health care. But, the solution to these are not more of commie stupidity or Arundati Royism, but lies in carefully planned policies that involves all the constituents - the government guiding and overseeing, corporations implementing, and the local communities working to even out the benefit spread. We would like to see the Mittals and Ambanis of Schooling, Agriculture and Medical Care and this is where India's future lie.

Pluto - No longer a planet

In an interesting move, a large body of astronomers collected under the aegis of IAU (International Astronomers Union) decided to demote the status of Pluto to a dwarf planet, instead of regular planet. It means our solar system has only 8 planets and not 9, as we studied till now.

The declassification seems to have been done in view of a majority's concerns of Pluto being a largely frozen surface and dissimiliar in composition to the other 8 planets, and 3 other bodies in the solar system - Charon 3, a satellite of Pluto, 2003 UB313, and a huge asteroid between Mars and Jupiter qualify to become a planets, if Pluto (with relaxed admission norms) continues to be accepted as a planet.

Lots of rewriting of school textbooks needs to be done, around the world :)

How do you feel, having to lose one interesting planet from our system?

References:

World mourns poor Pluto's plight

Pluto Loses Designation, Sues IAU

Is 8 enough- Reaction mixed to Pluto's demotion

Pluto No Longer Considered a Planet

World moving toward mediocrity

This is one topic that is troubling me for the last few years. Is the world moving towards mediocrity? Every era had its share of great persons in every field and the process of producing the greats kept on getting accelerated ever since 15th century. People like da Vinci, Newton, Keppler, Bismark, Adam Smith, Shakesphere... kept on arising in various fields and created various fields and revolutionized the entire society.

By the dawn of 20th century the process was in extreme speed. The world was seeing doyens like Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Neils Bohr, Alan M. Turing, Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, Max Plank, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Swami Vivekananda, Wright Brothers, Marconi, Edison, von Neumann and Claude Shannon.

But, can you name any living person now or any person born in our era (after 1930) who could belong to this hall of fame, of the world greats?

The world during the period of 1870 to 1930 saw so many inventions and breakthroughs. Extrordinary breakthroughs in Physics came in the form of Quantum theory, Electromagnetic theory, electricity, radio transimission, Semiconductors, Superconductivity, Radioactivity and Relativity (... I cant recount every great thing) and great inventions came in the form of telephone, radio, x-rays, electric motors, automobiles, airplanes, microwaves, movies.... How many great things have we invented in our era?

Where do we get to see physists like Einstein, Bohr, Marie Curie, Linus Pauling, Nichol Tesla, Feynmann and Mathematicians like Kurt Godel, Ramanujam, David Hilbert, Max Plank, Turing, Claude Shannon, in the current era? Where do we get the great economists like Keynes and Fisher or psychologists like Freud? Can you name atleast one great inventor of current time, whose work could be compared with Edison or Bell or Wright Brothers or Neumann? Why didnt we have such great persons in our era? Why the flame of the greats got almost extinguished by the 1960's? If we ask a person in 1940 about the list of top 10 all-time great physists, the list would countain atleast half from their own time. But, what about now? Can you name atleast one current physist who could be placed in the all-time list?

How many great breakthroughs in Computer Science are brought after its first 20 years? We are using almost the same model of Turing and most of the concepts (right from databases to algorithms to networks) are just refined, polished and engineered, but nothing revolutionarily new is produced that is comparable to the works of the first 20 years. Why didnt we do much in space sciences after 1960's and why didnt we produce any great airplane in the last 40 years?

In the previous era, world saw extrordinary leaders in the form of Winston Churchill, Roosevelt, Gandhi, Nehru, Mao, Hilter and Stalin (the last two are criminals against humanity) who commanded uncomparable control over their regions. There were extraordinary literary persons like Emerson, Mark Twain, Ayn Rand and Bernard Shaw.... There were these uncomparable aggressive businessmen like Herny Ford, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Alfred P. Sloan (the man who broughtup General Motors) . Where are their successors?

While we should expect the process of producing great things should have accelerated in the last 70 years, with the revolutions in communication and transportaion and globalization, it is dissapointingly low. I suspect that there is something that is fundamentally wrong. The great instituitions like MIT, Princeton, Cornell and Stanford are no longer producing great things that can change humanity. The papers are more of engineering improvements than revolutionizing things. The professors produce more of good works than extraordinary breakthroughs.

Fundamentally, there is an enormous pressure to perform. Students have to worry about careers, PhD candidates have to worry about graduating, professors have to worry about tenures and later a decent publication career. And this produces the fear that acts against the guts to produce something new. If a physics student proposes for something like a work of general theory of relativity or if a computer science student produces a new computing model, it will most probably be rejected and the admission committee or later the professor might advice the guy to work towards more ahievable goals. And the student might not have guts to go further and work against all odds and might even quit researching.

Thus, we are caught in a circle of mediocrity and we need great force to break this cycle. For this to happen, the current era people have to realize that history would call us the era of mediocrity and to avoid that we need to do something revolutionary.