Smile, Sir Dorabji

: When Sir Dorabji Tata organised the first modern meet of Indian athletes with an eye to the 1920 Antwerp Olympic Games, he found that despite running barefoot their performance compared “well with the times done in Europe or elsewhere”. Suitably impressed, Tata personally financed three of the best runners for Antwerp, a move that in his own words “fired the ambition of the nationalist element in the city”. Eighty nine years after that wind-swept day in Pune, when Tata first dreamt of an individual Olympic gold for India, Abhinav Bindra has finally found the Holy Grail. As the tricolour was hoisted in Beijing, to the stirring tunes of Jana Gana Mana, the poise and pride on his bespectacled visage spoke to a billion Indians, telling them that India could win too. Bindra’s achievement is as much a testament to his own skill and courage as it is a metaphor for the larger story of India. His gold medal-winning shot on the final attempt is the clarion call of a new India, an India that is not scared of looking destiny in the eye, a nation that goes out to win, not just to participate. Bindra has shattered the grand narrative of failure that has characterised Indian sport just as the emergence of the IT industry in the ’90s signified the end of the “Hindu rate of growth” that defined the economy since the ’50s. Just as a Narayana Murthy or an Azim Premji created the self-belief for India to act as a global player after decades of isolationism and the license-permit raj, so has Abhinav Bindra ushered in a new era of self-confidence. As the noted Olympic historian John Macaloon argues, the Olympics are a “crucible of symbolic force” into which the world pours its energies and a stage upon which, every four years, it plays “out its hopes and its terrors”. For every Indian, that Terror has come in the form of a question: A billion people and no gold medal. Why? Well, we now have an answer and thank god for Abhinav Bindra!

For far too long, we have complained about our failures in sport. We have blamed the system, we have blamed the politicians who run it, we have even questioned our genetics. Every four years, it has become a collective national ritual to blame everyone else when we find ourselves wanting in the global mirror of...

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