Who would have known who Joginder Sharma is unless he bowled the last over in T-20 world cup that fetched the title to India? Now there is one more reason to know who he is. Haryana, his native state, has decided to award him a whopping Rs.21 lakhs for just bowling the last over.
Suddenly the ugly face of a game hardly played anywhere else in the world is upon us, and the weight is too heavy to ignore. The amount of money announced collectively for the players takes the breath away. But it is downright uncouth, unbecoming, and unhealthy. Why?
Because as Subrata Bhattacharjee, the East Bengal coach and one-time national football player, points out the euphoria over cricket ensures that in India no other sport can prosper. No youngster will play anything other than cricket.
Had the space been somewhat proportionately divided, there would have less complaints. But the situation presently is heavily tilted in favor of cricket. To give a likely comparison, the cricket today is patronized to such an extent that it occupies 98% of the people’s imagination. Of the rest 1% belongs to Sania Mirza and tennis while every other sporting activity together commands just about 1%.
There is enough reason to feel indignant. Not long back the Indian hockey team had won the Asia Cup defeating South Korea. The national football team also won the Nehru Cup after a stupendous show under able coaching by Bob Houghton. Bengal’s Dola Bannerjee has just become the world champion in women’s archery.
Yet for all their extraordinary feats they received peanuts from the sponsors and the government, and virtually no worthwhile recognition whatsoever. Why then must not they feel deeply hurt if Yuvaraj Singh is awarded Rs.1 crore by the BCCI and a Mercedes Benz by someone else if all he did was being lucky enough to have a nice spell of just 8 minutes to score 6 sixes?
Is that an earth-shattering feat? Not really. In comparison, being a top goal-scorer in a hockey/football tournament is a much more difficult achievement.
Indian hockey coach Joaquim Carvalho has threatened to put 4 national players on hunger strike to protest the step-motherly treatment to the Asia Cup winners. He has found support from Pankaj Advani, the Khel Ratna recipient in August 2006.
Subrata Bhattacharjee feels that like the hockey players the football players led by Bhaichung Bhutia must also sit on hunger strike to express solidarity with a common cause.
The only silver lining in the dark cloud is the news of Indian Hockey Federation being promised $1 million to assist the players by the NRIs of US and Canada who have vowed to raise this amount.
May there be more and more such initiatives.
Update 1 (Sep 30):
After Carvalho’s threat of sitting on fast, some cash for the winning hockey players is on the way. The Maharashtra and the Karnataka governments will be paying Rs.2 lakh to each player from the respective states. State Bank of India will pay Rs.5 lakh to all team members. And the India Overseas Corporation (US & Canada) has arranged a corpus of Rs.20 crore for the entire team. [Ref: ABP, Sep 30]
Update 2 (Oct 1):
Viswanathan Anand after regaining world chess title at Mexico City told PTI that he had heard about the tumultuous welcome meted to the T-20 team from South Africa. “Yes, I heard about it.” He then wondered aloud, “It would be interesting to see what kind of reception I get when I come to India by the end of October.”
Now, Viswanathan Anand’s win is no mean feat, no flash-in-the-pan win like the T-20 cricket. His is an individual brilliance in a game played widely all over the world, not in some 5-6 countries that cricket is played.
Anand’s statement is thus a loaded one. It only confirms the terrible agony that participants and lovers of all other popular sports suffer from because of the naked and grossly unjustified display of money power in cricket.
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