The raw, uncut, pristine flock

Today, I was given the honour of reviewing my daughter's artwork. I call it an honour because arts is something built upon since my childhood days when my father had spotted my early talent and had rewarded me consistently based on the quality of my artwork and more so for how much he used to like my piece of abstraction represented on a sheet of paper. Then I had soon blossomed into a full-fledged painter and had begun painting aeroplanes, flowers, faces of beautiful people, parrots and then nature. It was this transformation from aeroplanes to nature that had captured my imagination so much so that I still benefit from that. Whenever I get drowned in the depression given by the man-made structures, there is something that I can sense and smell from the perfume of the air that comes to my rescue to provide bright and vivid creatures of nature that I can cling to. Today was an inch perfect example of that. I had got the chance to help my daughter with drawing a large tree draped under the hot Sun and housing a woodpecker and above all a sweet squirrel. The fluffy tail of that cute animal piqued my interest so much that I began looking at the different colours and hues that don its body. I could quickly spot a pattern with three colours present on its body. Later, I also realized that it can become a pet for the humans because of the sweet camaraderie it shares with us. I was stunned to see the raw speed of such a tiny creature yet a pristine and a rich flock of hair on its fluffy tail and elsewhere on its near invisible body. No wonder humans have been inspired by this creature and made movies such as Ice Age and its sequels. It has not been raining since several weeks in various parts of north India. A primary reason is either too much pollution of air due to vehicles occupying the road or the cruel trimming of trees as if they deserve a haircut during this summer season. If we would have allowed the vast trees to live freely and not chopped off the leaves and the branches from it, then we would not have been bothering about why the God has kept us bereft from the beautiful rain. This event of my virtually seeing a squirrel capturing my imagination which the tall buildings or the guzzling cars acting as spoilers has been enough to make me realize the importance of living with the nature and being with the nature at all times. It might rain tomorrow as is predicted by the Indian Meteorology Department and people may use that water to wash all the sins they have committed in the past. However, it is the smell of the rain and even more important the smell of the predicted rain that I am more interested in, and I have already got the fragrance of that smell! I would like to end this piece of artwork by saying that the nature has taught me to stay humble, happy, hopeful and hirsute in all times.

Run we can, and…

It was the London 2012 Olympics when we were all curious to know whether our all time great Abhinav Bindra who had famously won the gold medal in the Beijing 2008 Olympics will continue to win us more medals. We also wanted to see if the investment in the athletes will pay off. We were able to win six medals then, which is the richest haul in any Olympics for India till date. Once those games had culminated, it gave me the impression that we had won at least ten medals. We had struck silver and bronze, but our victories were looking so pyrrhic that the individual gold medal performance of Bindra was already bested by the combined ‘team’ performance of our London-bound athletes. So much so that my British colleague who was interning in India had hailed the Brits’ countless medals in equal light as India’s overall performances. However, then the fear of not being able to strike medals in team events was not up to the mark for India. That fear came back to haunt the Indian team in Brazil where the 2016 Olympics were held, and we ended up with two silver medals both in individual sport. We celebrated Dipa Karmarkar’s fourth place finish with such elan that we completely covered our mind with our incompetence in team sports.

Where India falters time and again is in not taking sports as a serious path to success. It is sport that gives us resilience, tests our resolve, sprinkles us with hope, fills us with buoyancy, gives us courage, and most importantly, makes us rise above every negativity of life such as hate, religion, race or caste.

We must excel in sports and give our Government a gumption to invest at least a billion dollars for the next Olympics.

We have been found floundering in swimming, cycling and countless other sports that require us to run. The meaning of a gold medal is that one needs to literally outrun and out-chase all the opponents.

We as a nation in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics have failed to take as a personal insult when we go down fighting in a boxing match to China, or a table tennis match to a Hong Kong citizen who was born in China, or to a swimming semi-final qualifying heat to a Chinese Taipei citizen.

We as a nation have consistently failed to flame our inspiration from athletes of different race or religion who have won gold medal out of utter hopeless situations. The victory of the Tunisian who upset all odds to beat the fan-favourite Australian for a swimming gold medal will be a story that will always be etched in gold for me.

We as Indians wilfully obliterate our perspective of why some people such as a woman from Bermuda chose to renounce their British citizenship to go to Bermuda and defeated a Brit by a handsome margin to strike Gold medal in triathlon that too under extremely bad weather.

We must begin to excel in the power of learning from others and in giving credit where it is due. We must respect the value of the Gold medal for the winner when we don’t even reach the podium or are not good enough to be qualifying for it.

We must not sit back and harp upon our flash-in-the-pan victories even if they had come in a team event, although that rarity had happened to us more than four decades ago when we had won our last Olympic Hockey gold medal.

We must not count on odds to wait for the Chinese woman gold medalist to get disqualified so that our own silver medalist can somehow escape with a gold medal.

The single most important step that is required for all of us is to be mindful of the tropical climate of the Indian subcontinent and thereby to allow every single Indian to run and chase the glory. We must keep inspiring everyone to assign equal importance to running on the land, under the water, or in the form of a triathlon, even if it requires us to do that under the cold conditions of Himalayas or to go to China or Russia for practicing. We must encourage the children to best out their lungs and to identify their own halo of Gold medal in equal stead as the visualization of the Ohm chanting. We must live, breathe and learn from sport every single moment of life. We must let women take a lead in sports. We must not repent why chess or cricket have not yet been included in Olympics. We must value team sport significantly above an individual sport. We must clap the winners and learn from the struggles of every champion who is not an Indian. Above all, we must stop our extremely bad habits of indulging in cricket, Bollywood, politics and corruption.

To win a medal in Olympics requires nothing short of a Herculean effort. Let us call it an ‘Indian’ effort in the future. Together, when we have run a billion miles, then we must remind ourselves of “We can!” and then offer our own brand of Indian-ness to the world in the future Olympics. A target of 2 Golds, 3 Silvers and 10 Bronze should be enough for us to see us be eligible for hosting our own Olympics.

If some sane Indian person encounters this blog while she is running, then who knows we may inspire her to win a Gold medal in the present Olympics itself!