God's Plenty

The film Chak De India has emerged as the runaway success of the year,and the credit must certainly go to those who participated in its making. Inpart, however, that credit must be shared by the sport of field hockey, and theunique place it has in India's imagination. While other, more elitist games,secure much of the support and sponsorship that makes for high profileprojection in the media, it is hockey that captures the true spirit of Indiansport. It is here that one finds, to borrow Dryden's words, "God'splenty". At the selection trials for the Under-18 Probables held on August30 at Gurgaon, for instance, 41 boys were selected from across the country. Noother sport in India can boast such diversity.

This has been a tremendous advance over past decades, when sportsadministrators had converted the National Game into a parochial fiefdom focusedon just two or three States, dominated overwhelmingly by Punjab. Today, theIndian Hockey Federation (IHF), with tremendous support from the SportsAuthority of India (SAI), has engineered a tremendous resurgence of hockey, withplayers from States as far apart as Manipur to Punjab to Maharashtra to TamilNadu, coming into the national teams - and, crucially, the national mainstream.

The unifying, binding, power of this game is infinite. Crucially, it inspiresand mobilises the very constituencies that have been neglected and forgotten byvirtually everyone - certainly everyone in the corridors of power. The boys weselected at Gurgaon included sons of daily labourers, subsistence farmers,tribal foragers, mofussil clerks, petty shopkeepers, some of the poorestof the poor in India. These are people who have, through their childhoods,suffered from nutritional deficiency and from almost every form of deprivationwe can imagine, and it is difficult for us to even conceive of the circumstancesunder which they have learned to play and excel in hockey.

In the recent Eight-Nation Junior Tournament held in Germany, the Indian team- interestingly, with players drawn from as many as nine States - droveimmediately to Holland and played Holland, the eventual winners, in two 'friendlies',one, a day after their arrival, and the second a day later. In the first matchthe team lost 3-2, in the second, they drew even. I discussed this performancewith a number of specialists conversant with the effects of air travel on thebody, and they were amazed that the team could play at all, leave alone play sowell, immediately so soon after extended travels. Thereafter, they went on tobeat Poland, Spain and Germany, three of the top teams in the world. This, byany standards, was an outstanding performance, and one that a particularEuropean observer attributed solely to the 'great advances' in tactics among theEuropean teams.

What few people know is that Indian Hockey is, today, run on an annual budgetthat is a small fraction (barely a tenth) of the cost of Chak De India;small European clubs invest more in the game than this country does; yet thenational team has consistently maintained a position in the world's top eight,and junior and sub-junior teams have lifted many an international trophy.

As many as 31 Indian youngsters are currently in Germany, attached to anarray of local clubs, and it is through devices such as these that the IHFmanages to give its teams at various levels maximum exposure to the game atinternational levels, as well as to new techniques and technologies, betterstandards of living and nutrition, and the personal experience of new worlds andcultures that instil greater personal confidence and create the character andwill to engage in contests at the cutting edge of international sports.

There has been much recent talk of adopting the 'Cuban model' for sportsdevelopment in India. What is not understood in such perspectives is that sportsdoes not exist in a vacuum - you would have to adopt the Cuban model for thecountry before you can apply it to one system within it, and I doubt if thereare many in India who advocate the political and administrative systems thatprevail in that country. Cuba, in any event, with a population of 11 million, asingle language, and a land mass that could fit into some of India's cities, canhardly serve as any useful model for a country of 1.2 billion, and with the kindof sheer diversity we experience here. Indeed, there are hardly any 'models' inthe world that we can simply import and apply to this country, with its uniquecomposition and its extraordinary vulnerabilities.

At the Gurgaon Trials, Jugraj Singh, who was coaching the youngsters in theart of drag-flicking, made a profound remark. He noted that 50 per cent oftalent was 'god given', and that 50 per cent was what we had to add. There areliterally millions of children across India, particularly in rural areas, whohave that 'god given' 50 per cent - and in an overwhelming proportion of cases,this is destroyed by malnutrition (the incidence is actually rising in manyareas of rural India) and poverty. A steady and focused effort has beendiscovering many of those who have the first 50 per cent, and there is anongoing and continuous struggle to add on the second 50 per cent.

Though this escapes the headlines, a strategy has been systematicallyimplemented over the past years to tap India's tremendous pool of talent, andgive it the nutritional, training and infrastructure support that can rescue itfrom the oblivion into which it is currently sinking. It is this strategy thathas produced the enormous diversity of representation in the many teams at thenational sub-junior, junior and senior levels of the game.

K.P.S.Gill is former director-general of police, Punjab. He is also Publisher, SAIR and President, Institute for Conflict Management. This article was first published in The Pioneer.