Olympics and the "Golden" Spirit

OLYMPICS AND THE 'GOLDEN' SPIRIT

The Fourth Estate is nowadays becoming a little too touchy and ambitious for comfort.  I do not intend to allude to the various scams being reported these days, but a statement by our Minister that in the next Olympics India should win a hundred medals.

            Frankly speaking, if you ask me, what’s wrong in that?  Not winning a hundred medals, but talking about it!  Do elders not exaggerate statements to encourage the youngsters and boost their morale?  Our Minister was no doubt, trying a pep talk! After all, you surely don’t want to enter the 21^st century sans hype. 

            The hype apart, the preoccupation of the press and indeed everyone with medals is utterly bewildering and confusing to me.  Indian culture has always discouraged greed and accumulation, so why crave for tiny pieces of gold, silver and bronze?  Ours has been a country which has been in the past known as the ‘golden sparrow,’ what to talk of a mere medal?

            Moreover, what our sports buff do not realise is the simple fact that one should always be compassionate.  One might argue that where the hell does compassion come into the Olympic Games.  Well, you see, it’s quite simple.  To win a medal, you must defeat your other competitors.  We all know that defeat hurts.  So why hurt anyone just for a bloody scrap of medal?

            And Sirs and Ma’ms, our athletes are not greedy.  On the field, they religiously believe in Lord Krishna’s message - ‘action is thy duty, reward is not thy concern.’  Our athletes do their duty on the field and are not bothered about the reward – medals in this case.  They play the game in the spirit of the game and that’s the end of that.

     Coming back to the statement of one of our many Hon’ble Ministers regarding winning a hundred medals at the next Olympics, the Minister perhaps was reminded of his schooldays, when we were taught that zeros on the left side of a figure do not mean anything.  Now, our Minister probably, with the passage of time has got addled whether it was the left side or the right side of the figure. 

            Our athletes, unlike other participants, are the only ones who seem to be bothered about the golden Olympic spirit.  The rest of the world seems to be bothered only about winning medals.  Our athletes would rather run for fun, which is the real golden spirit.  Of course, that is possible, only if we do not have the likes of Abhinav Bindra, Vijender Kumar and Sushil Kumar, who won medals at Olympics to spoil the “glorious” record of our country at the Games.