Monday, October 11, 2010

We the Indians

CWG is at its peak with just 2 days remaining before the curtains fall. India presently holds the 2nd position with 29 Golds behind Australia. From the topic of this blog you might be misled. I am not going to discuss the run-up to CWG and the negative publicity that surrounded it. That you can find easily on net and that too in abundance. Nor am I going to tell you the story of our glittering past, which again has volumes devoted to it. This post is about something very peculiar that I have observed in this CWG....

As I said, we hold 2nd position with 29 Golds, but you know what would an interesting analysis be? To see the break up of these 29 Gold. The picture looks something like this:

Shooting Wrestling Archery Weightlifting Tennis Total
13 10 3 2 1 29

Did you see it? NO!!! Leave Tennis apart, that I will count as exception, and now look at the other sports at which we have won.... Yeap, there you got it :)

We Indians are arguably big foodies of the world.... We eat and eat and eat!!! We believe lot less in physical exercise and put on big tummies. So man! we are literally heavyweights of world's wrestling! Shooting and Archery are in our blood. After all this is the land of Arjun. And coupled with the fact that these 2 sports also require lot less agility and minimal body movement, BANG... We are Champions here too! I don't know whether its in our blood or in the water of our rivers but we tend to excel in sports which require more of body strength, especially the abdomen strength :p, and less of agility. If there is a sport where we have to beat somebody or hit somebody/thing with bullet/knief/axe/shoe or any other weapon, we might be champions of that too. Sports like gymnastics or swimming or marathon which requires agility and/or physical endurance... well, I don't need to tell our status in these areas... We are the laziest human race. We just hate to move our ass off the chair, better if its a bed instead of a chair. And probably thats why we are so good at mind games... thinking doesn't require you to endure any physical pain! Moreover, being lazy, its in our nature to find short cuts to everything... and in process... we beat the world in many gray matter competitions. When Obama asks the American children to tighten their belts for Indian and Chinese, I say.... Feed them rich spicy food, let them loosen their belts and allow them to doze off lazily... someday you might catch us. But sports! well we have proved our point to some extent in some events and in the others I don't think we will be able to prove anything for many years to come.... But we are Indians, so you can never be sure. We did something in Tennis this time and we might do something in Badminton too... so better watch your back.... and take my advise on "heavy" games... You don't stand a chance there.

2 comments:

Sidharth said...

Both shooting and Archery require immense concentration. Most of our gold comes from this domain. What do you conclude from this?

We had been champions of hockey for many years (yes I know it requires less effort han tennis) but the sport got killed due to many known reasons.

I beleive that we have a lot of people working hard (physically also :) ), but the current system in India does not allow much sport to come up.

But things look to change. One of my friend told me a few weeks ago "kisi sports main hona chaiye tha, kaafi paisa hai aur naam bhi". Agree that he is naive to say that, but the point is when people see sports have a future, they would not stop the next generation from seriously persuing it :)

Sidharth said...

12 athletice medals :)