In India things move rather slowly. A
revolution never happens here, it is always a slow, gradual evolution.
Is it the Eastern stoicism, the in built
inertia or the abundance of day to day problems that make it very difficult to
stir us out of our comfort zones, only God knows.
Let us consider our quest for independence.
India fought its first battle of
independence in 1857- the famous Sepoy
mutiny that shook the British.
But, between then and independence was a
yawning ninety year gap. A gap of three
generations…
The first big
Indian software company was TCS, set up in 1968.
It took almost 37 years for the celebrated
author Thomas Friedman to write, “The World is Flat” and for many jobs in the
developed world to get “Bangalored”.
Reita Faria was the first Indian to win
Miss World. And, that happened in 1966.
It took another 28 years for India to
produce another Miss World, Aishwarya
Rai.
Now India boasts of the highest number of
Miss Worlds in the world after Venezuela.
India won the Cricket World Cup in 1983.
It took them more than 30 years to become a
top ODI team, who would win more matches than lose.
Infosys can be considered as the first
Indian company to be formed by professionals – people who left their jobs to
start afresh. It was started way back in 1981, in an era where business were either
run by multinationals or by traditional family houses.
More than 30 years later, today setting up
a business is no longer the sole prerogative of the Gujju, the Marwadi, the
Punjabi or the Sindhi. In Bengaluru, Mumbai, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Chennai –
almost every youngster you bump into in the business districts is either an
entrepreneur or wanting to become one.
In almost every sphere, the tipping points
were a few decades away from when it all started.
Why do we take so much time?
It might be that we react as a nation only when
we find something relevant to our lives.
When the Sepoy Mutiny happened, large
swathes of India was still living a superstitious life, untouched by the
British. The mutineers were the elite – members of the army, the princes. A
farmer in Machilipatnam, in coastal Andhra Pradesh or a trader in Jafrabad in
Gujarat was completely delinked from Delhi.
It took India’s greatest mass mobilizer,
Mahatma Gandhi to make it a common man’s quest to be free from British rule.
In software, the Y2K (the year 2000) fear is what ushered in an
Indian software revolution.
The beauty industry exploded when women
like Sushmita Sen, Diana Hayden, Priyanka Chopra, daughters of People like us
started winning titles internationally.
What has this got to do with Olympics?
To most Indians, Olympics have always been
beyond imagination. The only stories that have stayed with us were of Milkha
Singh missing the Bronze by 0.1 seconds and PT Usha missing it by 0.01 seconds.
It was almost always a story of misses.
The stray wins we got in the recent past –
Abhinav Bindra, Leander Paes, Yogeshwar
Dutt, Karanam Malleswari, Saina Nehwal
could not stir the nation into believing it could do something.
Shooting was too elitist, women’s
weightlifting and boxing too esoteric and men’s wrestling too much of a North
Indian phenomenon.
This seems to have changed in 2016, Rio.
While the results have been disappointing,
they have not left us distraught.
Sindhu and Sakshi have shown that we belong there, in the
elite category.
Unlike Milkha and Usha, these have been
cases of wins, not misses.
Sindhu’s match with Carolina Marin was a
rare sports phenomenon in India. That of families watching a non Cricket sports
match live on TV. Similar were Sakshi’s bout and Deepa’s vault.
This rare phenomenon has the power to
unleash a transformation in the Indian sports.
A transformation where a middle class
parent starts viewing sports, not just Cricket, as a viable career option.
Where, when a child says “I want to be an
athlete”, will not be viewed with skepticism or fear.
Rio 2016 could be our Quit India, T20 World
Cup, the Aishwarya Rai/ Sushmita Sen, Y2K moment.
A moment that can alter people’s mindset that
the impossible is just a few notches above the possible.
In a few decades from now, when we are among
the top 10 countries in the Olympics medals tally, we will have to blame it on
Rio.
