Couldn't believe that the media is devoting so much column centimeters and airtime to comment on Sanjay Dutt's Bombay blast trial verdicts.
I don’t want to spend time again to speak about it. But was that worth a 'national importance' certificate? Or was it the media's fetish with celebrity reporting?
Another burning national issue is the performance of the Indian Cricket team and Sourav Ganguly’s come back.
Obscene amount of columns are dedicated to it. The only sports news that the news channels think worthy of reporting are views of retired/thrown out cricketers on how to improve the present state of affairs.
Without realizing of course that if they had practiced what they preach now, probably things would have been better…if not now, atleast then!
We Indian’s are terrible sportsmen. I think history would prove it. There might be glimpses of triumphs, but altogether we are mediocre, if not below-average in sports.
Our national interest in cricket is virtue of us being one of 10 countries who play the sport. Meanwhile the interest in our national sport – hockey is way down the interest spectrum because too many countries are playing it and we never seem to be making the mark.
Yes, the issue of administration foul play is there, the Viren Rasquinha being just the recent one, to bite the dust.
Recently a colleague happened to mention the name of one Sharath Kamal.
He works as an employee with IOC. The only difference between him and other employees of IOC is that he is also the India No.1 in table tennis for the past 4 years. Sharath has been a success story and somewhat unique because despite he earning the stripes for India in the Common Wealth Games (2 golds in the 2004 edition), being an Arjuna Award recipient and representing India at the Olympics he still doesn’t have any sponsors. And this is because not many know about him, whereas the first boundary hit by a debutant goes with the price tag to major sports sponsors. Performing well and consistently at the International level requires a lot of investments especially in training.
Yes. IOC is his employer and they pay him money, but if that was enough we would have Sachin Tendulkar working with Bank of Maharasthra and Rahul Dravid with My sore Cements (or whatever). It might be my ignorance about “Table Tennis” as a sport, but I could still debate Sharad’s popularity among the other “sports lovers” in the country.
And this is ironical because, Table Tennis as a recreational sport has got immense following in this country.
I still find the media chasing rich-men’s sports like Formula 1 and doing reports on how Narain Karthikeyan and Karan Chandok are not doing anything and then golf-which has become the flavour of the season.
How is it that the media finds interest in these big-buck sports?
Is it by virtue of the PR employed by the sponsors of these big-bucks sports or is that the sports journalists are too lazy to find out and report these?
I am not recommending that they start writing full page reports on our national progress on Kabbadi and Kho-kho but I find it a strange irony that media finds only those sports with big bucks behind it as sports worth writing about.
There is an abject lack of any sporting icons in our country. When we fail to recognize the few sparks that emerge, we again push our collective conscience to mediocrity. How long do we wait?
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