India and Sports: The Harsh Reality
As always, we (India) ended the 2016 Olympics with a dismal performance in the medals tally. What shows us in even more poor light is the number of medals that we got as compared to the population of the country and hence the potential to win medals. Even the number of medals we came back with as a proportion of the contingent we sent in is dismal where we stand at 77th.
In the heated discussions that I have been a part of and that I have heard and come across, points were also raised about how we only follow cricket and cricket is given the most importance in the country while other sports are neglected.
My question to this is simple. Who is the one encouraging and giving importance to cricket in this country? Is it the politicians? Are they spending taxpayer’s money to run the IPL and sending the India around the world for the various matches?
The sponsors spending money on cricket are corporates?—?Wills, Sahara, Kingfisher etc. And why are they spending shit loads of money on cricket? Because they are able to recover the money and make lot more from advertisements and merchandise.
And the consumers of this advertisements and merchandise? It is us!! We Indian. We the people. We are ones driving the focus on cricket (specifically men’s cricket)and in the process cannibalizing the other sports in India.
India has 2 religions?—?Cricket and Movies (bollywood… kollywood… take your pick) and we follow the gods of the religions blindly.
If Pepsi was not advertised by the Cricketers and instead advertised by Hockey players, would we buy it as much? If Coke was not advertised by film stars and instead by scientists, would we still be consuming it so much?
While the politicians are easily the reason for over a dozen problems that India faces, let us not squarely blame them for this as well.
We the people are fuelling the fire for cricket in the country at the cost of the other sports. It is not the government or politicians who are not encouraging other sports in India, it is us! We are to blame for the sad state of sports in the country.
This is the Harsh Reality that is staring at our face that we just refuse to see and accept it!
Like they say?—?“When the buying stops, the killing will too”, when we start watching other sports, and encouraging other sports, and talking about other sports, publicly, then the interest levels will peak. The sports will become a sustainable means of living to the sports persons, and the sport itself will thrive. In due time we will have good representations in these sports in various International events and we will be among the medals.
It is foolish to expect that corporates will spend money in sports which are not popular. Cricket wasn't also profitable 30 years back. Fortunately we had some success over the years in that game and it became popular. Now it makes a perfect economic sense to invest in cricket by the corporates as ROI is higher. Over several years in future we will also have success coming up in many others sports; badminton may be one which will lead that. But when private investment cannot come, only way to accelerate success is through government investment.