posted by ANON
P Sainath
In the last week of July 2012, four hundred farmers killed themselves in just three small villages of Vidarbha. No journalists recorded their story. No government minister visited their homes. No message of condolence came from the Prime Minister or the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission. For, that same week the Olympics had begun with 7000 Indian journalists in attendance. The Prime Minister sent his well-wishes, as did Montek. They were fed the finest foods at government expense, while those who grew that food suffered and died; their very existence denied by the multinationals who drove them into debt. The airfare for the contingent could have wiped out farmer debt in three districts of Maharashtra…
Shekhar Gupta
On my way back from the Seoul Olympics in 1988, dreaming of the day that Delhi would one day host the Commonwealth Games, I ran into Sebastian Coe, now organising the London Olympics, when he had a hurried breakfast with Rajiv Gandhi and I in the first-class lounge at Changi airport. Later, when we became friends after our regular lunches together every Davos, we would laugh about our first meeting. I was a young patrakaar then, and arrogant as our fraternity is, especially if you are from Haryana, where Coe’s maternal grandmother was also born. So I took my heart in my hands, as I had at the Battle of Jaffna. Coeji, I asked him, why can India win no golds? “Shekhar”, he said – he always called me “Shekhar” – “It is because your jholawallas have not let you reform and open your retail sector to foreign investment…”
Editorial in The Hindu
Already at the top of the gold-medal tally, the People’s Republic of China has once again demonstrated the folly of a de-stabilising alliance with the United States of America, on the assumption that the US’ dominance of the world order will continue forever. Although the structure of the Olympics is hopelessly biased towards the West, with few of the People’s Republic’s indigenous sports represented – such as the traditional folk game of Stone-the-Corrupt-CounterRevolutionary-Running-Dog – the wisdom of international multi-polarity has been on display in London. India, too, disadvantaged by the absence of native Tamil-Brahmin sports like chess, would do well to learn from China instead of following the discredited Anglo-American approach…
Tavleen Singh
Is it any wonder that we cannot hold our head up at the Olympics? It is because of the emasculation of India by the Nehru-Gandhi family. Nehru despised competition, meaning that he stifled India’s entrepreneurs and its athletes. Today, Sonia Gandhi has shown herself completely out of touch with new India, which is no longer satisfied with a bronze or two. Her cultural alienation is at fault. Someone from the Italian countryside who wears her mother-in-law’s sarees so unadorned cannot understand India’s civilisational yearning for gold…
Arundhati Roy
Gold. What a word it is – round, weighty, Western. Gold is what India’s obscenely rich, in their comfortable Jor Bagh enclaves and their forest houses in Pachmarhi, strive for. Their veins run not with the red of the working man, but the Gold of the indolent, slim-wristed rentier. In the holiest place of post-liberalisation India, the stratified hell that is Gurgaon – where multi-storeyed buildings crush beneath their layers the hovels of those that clean twelfth-floor bathrooms and wash seventeenth-floor windows with water stolen from indigenous tribes – there stands a mall devoted only to Gold.
Can there be anything uglier?
Hard as it is to imagine the reaction of those living in pristine purity in India’s trackless forests to the concrete consumerist fantasy of a Delhi mall, how can one such as I look into their deep, wise eyes and try and explain that their ancestral lands are torn apart to bring up little lumps of Gold to be sold there, and to be made into watches that, sitting on the plump pimpled arms of India’s oligarchs tick-tock away the few instants of time remaining to a better, purer, more natural way of life?
Our Republic of tatters, our pretend-democracy, needs pillars of Gold to sustain its rotten edifice. And that is what its futile Olympic quest is all about…
News Laundry for more
(Thanks to Mukul Dube)