Some thoughts on commonwealth games;
Question: What is Commonwealth Games ?
Answer : Its an international, multi-sport event played among commonwealth of nations.
Question: What is commonwealth of nations ?
Answer: It is an association comprising the Britain, its dependencies (like Wales , Scotland etc) and former British colonies that are now sovereign states with a common allegiance to the British Crown.
I thought we got independence from British long back, then do we really need to show our allegiance to the British Crown ? Why do we even need to be a part of commonwealth of nations where the British monarch serves as a symbolic head ? Irony is we still wants to show our loyalty towards a nation who ruled,raped and looted us for several years. Why are we,still, so obsessed with British ? its a mockery of our hard earn independence. Anything British must be rejected.
These days it has become a tradition to link nation's pride with any damn thing happen in the country and media is playing a major role in it. Why should nation's pride be damaged because of a gaming event which we should have dumped long before?. Shouldn't we set targets like 100% electrification of our villages, achieving 100% literacy, giving social security to all the citizens or securing our boarders, and claim nation's pride ? but no, our so called free and independent media friends do not think so. They are only interested in masala which our politicians and babus provides very open heartedly.
I don't support our participation in commonwealth and I really don't care whether games will be a success or failure, how I see all this drama as; at least in the name of hosting commonwealth games, our athletes will get some world class training facilities and will be able to win some medals in international sporting events.
Whether we should be a part of commonwealth of nations or not is totally a different issue but talking about recent crisis in Delhi Commonwealth Games, It did not surprise me a bit that our corrupt babus and netas are once again failed to deliver on their promises, this time, made to the international audience. Suresh Kalmadi, organizing committee chief , openly declared, thinking that he is making a speech in his constituency, that the infrastructure he is going to build for commonwealth games will be better than that of Beijing Olympic !!! Kalmadi and his team had seven years in their hand to deliver but our politicians are not very used to work within a timeline. Instead of seven years if they would had fourteen years in their hands, the result would have been the same because they don't feel any sense of responsibility for their work and even though they are spending/wasting our tax money they are not accountable to anyone ! What do you think ? Will there be any actions taken against those who are responsible for this mess ? at max kalmadi will be replaced by another type of Kalmadi and things will come back to normalcy.
When I heard Organizing Committee's spokesperson Lalit Bhanot saying " For us and for you it is clean, but they have a different standard of cleanliness, It is a matter of difference in perception". I believed him because many times it happens that people over-expect when they go to someone else's place,but after seeing the pictures on news channels (paan stains on washbasin, dog's paw prints on bed, leaked toilets etc etc) one thing I can surely tell is that any human being, no matter what their perception about cleanliness is , can ever imagine that the place shown in the news channels was clean.
But now it is becoming too much. As always, media and international delegates are exaggerating the things, I used to follow the CWG stories on electronic and print media but couldn't found any single positive point since the foot over bridge collapsed due to the use of sub-standard material. (It is still not clear that the material used was really a sub-standard or there was some other reason ). Now come-on, I don't agree that after spending billions of rupees on infrastructure they have not build anything positive. I don't know whatever they have build is better than Beijing Olympic infrastructure or not but one thing is clear from the photographs put on the CWG website, everything is not dark in games village and training facility.
I fully support the media for their war against corruption in organizing the games but at the same time I feel very dejected when they keep on showcasing only the bad thing and completely ignore the efforts made by hundreds of people who worked towards making the event successful.
I hope, some day our media, politician and bureaucrats will understand their responsibility and use their power at the right place for the betterment of their fellow countrymen.
-Parikshit Gohil
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