We lost our chance to say, ‘Buddies, we are Indians of a new India!’ to the world.
THE LARGEST multi-sport event conducted in India so far, the 2010 Commonwealth Games being held satisfactorily now for 71 nations has showed that ‘Indians will be Indians’ and nothing can change us.
After winning the bid in the year 2003 over Canada which has four times organizing experience, it was the first time any developing bigger economy got the opportunity to showcase its technology, infrastructure, skill and so called ’Indian Mind’ to the world. Though, we have an experience of organizing Asian and Afro-Asian Games successfully. However, how can we go against our age old Indian tradition, we started the preparation on the eleventh hour after some pressure from Common Wealth Games Federation in 2008. Our so called ‘savior of society’, the media noticed the slow progress not before July 2010 when Maoists were taking a power nap, there was no bomb blast and for their surprise even our Indian Trains were not colliding. Our forefathers had understood our nerve to give us an adage ‘Subah ka bhula agar sham ko ghar aa jata hai to use bhula nahi kahte’ (If lost in the morning returns home in the evening, he is not lost actually).
The whole world turned their eyes on the Indian media after exposing a large scale corruption and unpreparedness, calling the venues as ‘filthy and unlivable’. This time, they must have done excellently in TRP. There was a rat race for sting operations; even an Australian TV reporter from Seven Network could not resist his temptation to show the security breaches to the world. It was the first time when Indian Media were ‘eye opener’ for the whole world. The Australian reported: C'wealth Games India's Shame’ headlined the Times of India, the national Hindi-language newspaper Navbharat Times headlined “Double trouble for the Games”.
I also learnt that the budget estimation was 1620 Cr (2003) which escalated to 11,490 Cr in 2010 (excluding non-sports development). Supreme Court has to intervene into out of interest area as the actual expenditure is expected to be a whopping 70,000 Cr (US$ 15.45 billion), 43 times more than the original estimation and 14 times more than 2006 Melbourne CWG 2006 expenditure (US$ 1144.4 million). The media’s allegations on the Organizing Committee must be true and Central Vigilance Committee (CVC) has found a large scale discrepancy in handling the money and resources. Equipments were bought and contracts were awarded at much higher prices with poor quality and management assurance, etc. However, it can be expected out of some Indian Minds as nothing happens here without the C-word."These rooms are clean to both you and us; foreign standards of hygiene differ from our perception." a second front officer of Organizing Committee was true to his heart. We consider ourselves 2-tier and accept the superiority of others over us. A temporary ‘beautification’ is resulted in 160,000 displaced people as CNN reports and bamboo screens have been erected around the slums hide from 1-tier visitors as The Daily Telegraph (London) reports. When ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ depicted our poverty to the world, there was also so much of home grown criticism. Should we follow the Ostrich’s way to solve a problem?
All these resulted in a tug-of-war in the Indian parliament, some resignations, some hot prime time bulletins and non-participation of some eminent athletes in this version of CWG. We lost our chance to say, ‘Buddies, we are Indians of a new India!’ to the world. When China and South Africa had established precedents of standard and success recently, we should have come out of our Indian mindset. I wish everything would go in proper direction to save us at least from humiliation in future.
‘As developing nations we must stand together. We cannot allow developed countries to go out there and take the last seat in the hall’, said the president of South Africa’s Olympic committee who was assertive enough to say that he is willing to clean any toilets to help ensure it goes ahead. Can’ we emulate him? I hope our media will not bother about their TRPs to discuss things to put the responsible into the ambit of law when everything is over. Good Luck ‘CWG 2010’!
