When it tours abroad, the Indian hockey team stays in hotels the cricket team’s kit bags wouldn’t look at. Each player gets the munificent daily allowance of $20. Try and even invite a friend to have coffee with you on that.

Hockey, tennis, chess, football, and even volleyball, are games where young Indian players are making an international mark. But, the sudden interest in India in the resurgence of other sports, their moment of glory and media attention, is sadly a fleeting response, rues Anil Dharker.

Someone said, “At last! A respite from cricket! India now has sports stars who are not cricketers.”
The next day, a national newspaper carried a photograph of some of these other sports stars. There were around a dozen of them in the picture with some more joining in: they were in their playing attire, skirts and T-shirts and sports shoes and socks. But, instead of the sports equipment you would expect them to hold in their hands, each one was carrying a bucket! This, then, was our national women’s hockey team, in training at 5.30 in the morning. The team had won the gold medal at the last Commonwealth Games and was now preparing for another tournament. But, at Delhi’s Nehru Stadium where they were staying, there was not a drop of water.

“Sometimes these problems occur,” the team manager explained. Presumably, she has seen it all before, and worse. As an old hand at the way our non-cricket teams are treated, she probably is glad that at least the team members have buckets. If they hadn’t won gold, they would have had to make do with pots and pans and cans.

Enough said about our hockey. Our latest 15-minutes of fame example from Other Sports is a girl who is Muslim and plays tennis, which are three minorities rolled into one. Considering that we have never had a woman player who has even remotely got into any world rankings, Sania Mirza’s feat of winning the girl’s doubles at Wimbledon is an incredible feat. But, take it from me, she has already had her quota of fame (15 minutes, didn’t we say?). While cricket’s youngsters become a pin cushion for sponsors’ logos, what Mirza is going to get is “Beti ho ya beta, rakho parivar chhota.” In other words, she will become the brand ambassador for the government’s girl child/ population control campaign.

Another 15-minutes of fame person is Anjali Bhagwat. The ace shooter, one of the few world-class women sportspersons India has ever produced, is suddenly in the news. But, she isn’t making headlines because she has won an event; she is in our papers only because of the controversy about why she was initially denied a national award. May be so, you might say, but at least a sport like shooting is getting noticed.

But, the real truth is that these successes have come in the monsoon after the cricket World Cup, when no matches are being played by our cricketers. Even the players, who were playing in English county cricket, were doing badly. So, how is any self-respecting newspaper going to fill up its sports pages? By writing about Pillay, Mirza, Bhagwat, and co. But wait another month or two, and we will be back to normal: our cricketers will be in action and all will be right with the world.