a price to pay for perfection

We are in mid­dle of the Olympics and India has claimed its first and only indi­vid­ual Gold in the his­tory of games. Once in four years, Indi­ans think or try to think about sports. And there are ques­tions that you will find them rais­ing vehe­mently in cir­cle of friends or over a cup of cof­fee. The emo­tions vary from shrugs to smirks. From indif­fer­ence to deri­sion at govt. sports poli­cies, you will find it all.

This Olympic is no dif­fer­ent and yet a bit, for the rea­son that China is host­ing it, not only host­ing it but using it craftily to raise itself on the world stage and show­case its tal­ent and capa­bil­ity.  The con­tro­ver­sies linked to Olympic have already drawn a lot of crit­i­cism and ques­tions this time. Be it Tibet issue or ‘lit­tle angel mim­ing’ or fake graph­ics used in the open­ing cer­e­mony; for that mat­ter, be it the last-minute beau­ti­fi­ca­tion cam­paigns of erect­ing walls in front of unpre­sentable areas in Bei­jing — the quest for per­fec­tion has come out more as ‘des­per­ate’ rather than a nation’s gen­uine efforts to make the Olympics mem­o­rable. The unspo­ken ques­tion that lingers in everybody’s mind is ‘What’s the price that China is will­ing to pay to get such a global acknowledgement?’.

The open­ing cer­e­mony has been spec­tac­u­lar and team China is lead­ing the medals count com­fort­ably. They paid a price to achieve this. Its for them to decide whether the deal was prof­itable. In this con­text, I read an inter­est­ing Indian take here. I also vaguely remem­ber an arti­cle that I read when Obama’s pas­tor remarks had evoked shock­ing reac­tions among Amer­i­cans. The arti­cle con­trasted the Chi­nese poli­cies on sup­press­ing the Tibetans with the open-minded Amer­i­can soci­ety where the peo­ple at least have the free­dom to speak their mind out (of course refer­ring to Rev. Wright). Its a valid point esp. when I hear peo­ple (some­times myself) demean­ing their polit­i­cal sys­tems and com­par­ing it to oth­ers. Grass is not often green on the other side in real­ity. I have prob­a­bly real­ized it more after com­ing in con­tact with the sup­posed other side. As long as there is a sys­tem, it will be crit­i­cized no mat­ter what. But its bet­ter than not hav­ing a sys­tem at all. The Olympics related crit­i­cism could have been just an envy on oth­ers’ part but the Chi­nese them­selves have had mixed emo­tions of pride and angst on the sub­ject. Who is to decide?

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