Duncan Stone’s new book Different Class: The Untold Story of English Cricket has important lessons for Indian cricket and sports. It does not merely challenge the orthodoxy of English cricket, it demonstrates how the values and belief systems at its heart were developed in order to divide, rather than unite, the English at every level of the game. It was[Read More…]
Knowing that no right minded Indian thinks the rate of inflation, the price of potatoes, cooking oil, petrol, diesel, rice, flour, eggs, indeed, any commodity you can name, the indices of joblessness, the monopolization of national wealth, the degradation of Institutions, the collapse of parliament, the weakening of democracy, the preponderance of hate crimes and vendetta vigilantism, the studied relegation[Read More…]
The discussion on football in India was so evasive about real issues at the Tata literature festival last Sunday in the context of the world cup football beginning this Sunday in Qatar. The whole focus was on commercialisation of the game, not democratisation, it was all about how to exploit the game for money and profits. There is a great[Read More…]
Here’s the big question in Jock Culture these days: Is the Kingdom of Golf being used to sportswash the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Or is it the other way around? After all, what other major sport could use a sandstorm of Middle Eastern murder and human-rights abuses to obscure its own history of bigotry and greed? In fact, not since the 1936 Berlin Olympics was used[Read More…]
The Indian women cricket team was on the verge of clinching the gold medal at the Commonwealth Games, but just missed out on this much coveted goal. Till the last over the result could have gone either way, but being more experienced, the Australian team could win. It does not matter. A T20 match result can go either way within[Read More…]
It was, all and all, an odd spectacle. The Ladies’ Singles victor for Wimbledon 2022 had all the credentials that would have otherwise guaranteed her barring. Being Russian-born, news outlets in Britain walked gingerly around The All England Club’s decision to ban Russian players yet permit Elena Rybakina to play. Sky News noted that, “Moscow-born Elena Rybakina, who represents Kazakhstan,[Read More…]
He is not from the troubled, picturesque, paradise Valley. He is from Jammu. And soon, sooner than India or the world can imagine, Umran Malik, 22, the newest fast-bowling sensation, will play for India in the world stage. According to another opening batting legend, who has faced the best of fast bowlers during his hey-days, on fast-tracks, in foreign lands,[Read More…]
As one who has followed Olympic women’s figure skating, especially since Michelle Kwan (ironically a Chinese-American), I was—as an egalitarian feminist when it comes to sports—excited to learn that there was a 15-year-old Russian woman skater, Kamila Valieva, who could do effortless quad jumps. Waiting in anticipation of her first Olympic performance, I listened to commentators and former US skaters[Read More…]
The recent acquisition of the Newcastle United football club by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, along with financier Amanda Staveley and the billionaire Reuben brothers, was a source of much excitement for some former players. Old boy Alan Shearer did little to conceal it. “We can dare to hope again,” he rejoiced. In The Guardian, Barney Ronay was less enthusiastic,[Read More…]
Amid chaotic politics and anti-immigrant and refugee sentiments, Stadio Olimpico in Rome seemed like an oasis of social and cultural harmony. AS Roma and Raja Casablanca fans gathered in their thousands on a hot Saturday evening to cheer for their teams in a friendly match, the first in the Olimpico for nearly a year and a half. The guest team is a[Read More…]
In 1988 on August 22nd, I became the 16th Indian to swim the English Channel and in this work I am summing up the challenge involved and how its experience or training for it has so many similarities with that of a the life of a Marxist or social revolutionary. Few challenges are as daunting as swimming the English Channel.[Read More…]
Bikinis are a mandatory part of female handball players’ dress code. In contrast, male players wear shorts. Similar sexist discrimination prevails almost in all events. Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, a retired professor from the University of Toronto specializing in critiques of the Olympic industry and gender issues in sport, said: “There are sports where the overt sexualization of female bodies is[Read More…]
Some of the most hearwarming memories of the recent Olympic Games for India will remain of sportspersons from humble backgrounds overcoming very heavy odds to perform very well at the biggest international sports event. Whether their hard work and perseverence resulted in medals or not, the great effort they put in won widespread admiration. The most obvious example is that[Read More…]
To Narendra D Modi Prime Minister Dear Shri Modi, Sports strategy- Mere lip service will not suffice- Some suggestions on a sports strategy It is an extraordinary effort put in by the Indian athletes and sportspersons at the ongoing Tokyo Olympics which has brought laurels to India and united the entire nation with a collective sense of pride. It is[Read More…]
They were in with a shot. The English team, deliriously floating on chants of Football’s Coming Home, had made it to their first major tournament final since 1966. The UEFA European Football Championship would be decided at Wembley against an Italian side unblemished by defeat since September 2018. But the English, coached by the much admired Gareth Southgate, succumbed in[Read More…]
Written by Danaka Katovich and Ariel Gold For human rights advocates who also enjoy the sport of car racing, a great opportunity awaits us. Lewis Hamilton, the only Black driver in the history of Formula 1 racing, has been bravely and consistently supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. In the wake of the protests against the murders of George Floyd[Read More…]
Suffocating the grassroots. Mocking the working class origins of the game. World football, and primarily European club football, has long done away with loyalties in favour of cash and contract. The professionalization of the game has seen a difficult relationship between fan, spectator and sporting management, none better exemplified than the price of tickets, the role of branding and sponsorship.[Read More…]
No sport arguably took grace and artistry to depths of regions the game of cricket did. Bowling and batting or even fielding at its best was reminiscent of poetry or a musical composition. Fast bowling was not all about agression and speed but about poetic beauty. Batting was not all bout power and technical skill but about touch art and[Read More…]
25 years ago on March 17th Sri Lanka captured the coveted cricket world cup title for the first time .It exuded aura of invincibility as few teams ever did like a great emperor annexing territory after territory. A red letter day was written in cricket with an underdog triumphing for the 2nd time. We must salute them for binding or[Read More…]
Today on March 6th we commemorate a landmark day in the history of India being the 50th anniversary of legendary Sunil Gavaskar making his debut in test cricket. For the first time ever the immortal Sunil Gavaskar stepped on a cricket pitch to set sail for one of the most illustrious careers ever of any sportsman. What set him apart[Read More…]
This writer does love sports, especially football and baseball. I was raised as a baby boomer with literally a football, a bat and glove in my hands 24/7. The only time us kids tossed aside those items and scooted upstairs was when our Moms yelled out ‘ It’s Howdy Doody Time!’ Other than that, most of us were back on[Read More…]
Although Cricket has embraced modernity with open arms, the game still couldn’t evade its colonial history. Not many nations who hadn’t been former British colonies play this game. India, a dominant, over-resourced powerhouse of the game, has been a subject of the British Empire for over two centuries. As a result, cricket, just like police or bureaucracy or any other[Read More…]
Today on February 7thH we commemorate the 40th anniversary of Gundappa Vishwanath’s epic 114 at Melbourne in 1981. This knock virtually took India out of the doldrums or despair to effect one of cricket’s great turnarounds to win a test and draw a rubber on Australian soil for the first time. The memories of his strokes on this day are[Read More…]
It was never meant to be like this. After the Indian cricketing team met misery and disaster in the first test match at Adelaide, registering a paltry 36 in its second innings, little hope was had for the touring side. Australia threatened rout and massacre. The Border-Gavaskar trophy seemed within the home side’s grasp. And the home side had every[Read More…]
With the advent of the thirteenth edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL), the country, whose love for the game of cricket knows no bounds, found its much-seeked, collective escape for more than a month and a half. The notion of sport providing a hiatus from the hassles of our everyday life is certainly true, and for many sports aficionados,[Read More…]
Diego Armando Maradona turns 60 on October 30. “God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn’t even need to exist.” – Charles Baudelaire. It is with these words that the renowned filmmaker Emir Kusturica’s ninety-minute documentary on the one and only Maradona begins. Kusturica’s film, structured like a ‘musical’, does more than what a hundred newspaper[Read More…]
He was very much one of those cricketers who made the pulse race, a figure for the advocates of a faster variant of the game. Nothing of the solid blocker in the man, though he could, if needed, linger at the crease. Australia’s Dean Jones sported equipment perfect for the shorter format of the game: lightning quick between the wickets,[Read More…]
Back in the time before the time before the time before now, we used to have a chant. It would name some courageous, creative, fighter for justice and then urge that we Live Like Her, Live Like Him. In that time, in the next time, in the next time, up until now, would any serious committed activist for racial, gender,[Read More…]
Undoubtedly, sports and physical activities are essential for our mental and physical wellbeing. But how can a sport help in addressing sexual and reproductive health issues of the youth, and social ills like sexual and other forms of gender-based violence? It looks somewhat incredible. Well Grassroot Soccer, an adolescent health organization, seems to be doing exactly that. It has leveraged[Read More…]
When Sahar Khodayari this week set herself alight in front of a Tehran courthouse, she indicted world soccer body FIFA, its Asian regional group, the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), and their presidents, Gianni Infantino and Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa. Messrs. Infantino and Al Khalifa have been selective in their support for women’s soccer rights. Mr. Infantino was in[Read More…]
One may or may not like cricket – not the worm, but the game – or even, could be someone like a typical Frenchman or woman who doesn’t understand the game, or pretends he/she doesn’t have any clues as to what British men (and now women too) do with a ball, two bats, and six sticks, inserted into the[Read More…]
In an earlier article in Medium, I wrote about a corrosive sports culture that brings out peoples’ baser instincts- from applauding violence to replacing a plural view of humanity with elemental tribalism. In the piece, I also discussed sports-obsession as an example of the abdication of affirmative citizenship, given the time, money, and mental energy people spend on sports versus civic[Read More…]
Should it matter this much? A wealthy, successful individual expressed fury at the most popular object of vitriol in any sport. The umpire or referee is only ever neutral in the eyes of a falsely contrived standard: that someone must be objective, neutral and mindful of enforcing the rules of the game. In the eyes of the player, the figure[Read More…]
The 2018 World Cup delivered on all the promises and allayed all the suspicions and jeremiad predictions. It had a gamut of ineffaceable moments, vocabulary of emotions, kaleidoscope of iconic goals and unforgettable controversies. More often than the football fan would want, World Cups can be deceptively monolithic in terms of crippling nerves, attritional play, combative and virulent atmospheres and[Read More…]
With the euphoria of men’s football world cup drawing to a close, there has been little discussion on ‘womens’ football’ . Sports like cricket, football or hockey are primarily dominated by men. The tournaments and world cup matches played by men are sponsored, telecast and viewed regularly while women playing these sports are rarely telecast due to less viewing and[Read More…]
Saudi Arabia has much at stake when its national soccer team enters the pitch for the opening match of the 2018 World Cup in Moscow. With politics a permanent fixture, Saudi Arabia is playing in the World Cup finals for the first time in more than a decade at a moment that the kingdom is vying for enhanced influence in[Read More…]
There was an audacity about it, carried out with amateurish callowness. As it turned out Australian batsman Cameron Bancroft, besieged and vulnerable, had been egged on by Australian cricket captain Steve Smith and the Australian leadership to do the insufferable: tamper with the ball. Before the remorseless eagle eyes of modern cameras, Bancroft, in the third Test against South Africa[Read More…]
President Trump initially invited the NBA Champion Golden State Warriors – a predominately Black American team, that is supportive of the current ‘Take-a-Knee’ protest that is erupting in American Sports – to come to the White House in honor of their recent NBA Championship victory. But when their super star guard, Stephen Curry, made some disparaging remarks about the invitation,[Read More…]
President Trump has picked the right argument in America’s Cultural War, but his BDS Movement against America’s protesting NFL, NBA, MLB athletes First Amendment ‘Freedom of Speech’ rights is totally wrong-headed. Henceforth, whenever any American athlete decides to protest during the playing of the national anthem to call attention to the nauseating extent of racism, prejudice, jingoism, sexism and xenophobia[Read More…]
At every turn in American culture, be it politics, sports or the corporate world, the citizenry is constantly taught, some would argue brainwashed, to believe in the Cult of the Uniform & The Flag, be it that of the armed forces, local law enforcement, or sports. It’s a veritable religion that one ever dares to criticize at their peril. Political[Read More…]
It was a scrappy affair, and it resulted in a predictable result: the re-election of veteran administrator John Coates as president of the Australian Olympic Committee by 58 votes to 35. Such a process was all in all dull but for the notable lid it had blown off regarding Olympic harmony down under. King Coates, as it were, has ruled[Read More…]
Not too long ago, while leaving the gym, I overheard a conversation about the best female tennis players of all-time. As I walked home, I pondered my own list and came up with five women with whom we’re on a first name basis: Serena, Steffi, Martina, Chrissie, and Venus. When considering who might be next, I suddenly remembered Monica Seles.[Read More…]
It seemed an unnecessarily grand gesture, but the English Premier league discovered last week that Manchester United had appointed its own counterterrorism manager. The person is said to be a former inspector from Greater Manchester Police’s specialist research unit. As with everything else in matters of security, such a move will stir and spark discussion: if they have one, why[Read More…]
“In terms of prize money, the Melbourne Cup is worth more than the Grand National or any race in America, and it is far more popular in terms of national identity.” Richard Waterhouse, ABC Radio, Nov 3, 2015. An inspection of the hungry, jostling crowds gathering at the gates of the Flemington Race Course, Melbourne, gives a false sense of[Read More…]
Chip Ward has made the clear case for our needing to collectively address Climate Change issues with Native Americans in mind, and it’s undeniable that any inroads which black activists carve out respecting identity issues won’t amount to nearly enough if — simultaneously — certain environmental matters aren’t faced up to post haste. By us all, colors all across the spectrum
The disclosure of confidential material has its own sometimes fraught ethics. When it comes to medical information, assumptions abound that confidentiality comes first. Not, however, in international sports, a notorious field where the corrupt rub shoulders with the desperate; where perspectives of the supposedly level playing field meet unevenness and disadvantage. In such a case, disclosures can be both political[Read More…]
Obsessions of any sort, notably of a consuming nature, are never healthy matters. The drive to win gold, laced with a desperation often reflected in steroid consumption and psychological battering, has made the Olympic Games the least of savoury spectacles. Even worse than the physical reduction of the athlete to mechanism and medal winning machine is the complicity towards it[Read More…]
The 2016 summer Olympic games will open today, Friday August 5, in Rio de Janeiro at 8:00pm (local time), when the Olympic flame will be lit in Rio de Janeiro’s prestigious Maracanã Stadium. Some 11,500 athletes representing 28 sports and 207 nations, are expected to participate; 306 events have been scheduled. The Rio event is the 29th since the Olympics[Read More…]
“The investment is not for us, it’s for the foreigners.” Felipe Paiva, Rio favela resident, CBC, Aug 3, 2016 The hideous mess that is the Olympic spectacle is about to be charged at the opening ceremony in Rio de Janeiro. Its lead-up has been tumultuous, suggesting that any ideal of peaceful reflection by states, participants, and observers about the broader[Read More…]
Wounds have opened; recriminations are all around. The Rio Olympic Games, even before the first act, has already shown how it will be one of the more interesting ones for all the wrong reasons. (Eventually, such wrong reasons tend to seem right.) A glaring feature of the latest ruckus lies in the administration (or maladministration) of international sport. Disagreement, for[Read More…]
Protesting workers and youth in Angra dos Reis, a coastal town about 100 miles south of Rio de Janeiro, blocked an Olympic procession Wednesday night, seizing and extinguishing the Olympic torch before being driven back by police firing teargas and rubber bullets. The protest, coming barely a week before the August 5 opening of Rio Olympics, is emblematic of[Read More…]
The Olympics remains a black hole of needless expenditure, sucking services into it with impending and merciless doom. Unused stadia, tracks left to moulder, services supposedly linked to urban renewal turned into dilapidated wonders. That is the Olympic legacy in its lingering aftermath. Another feature of the Olympics is the tendency to turn a city into a super security haven,[Read More…]
The idea of excluding a country wholesale brings with it dangers that decision makers may well not see. It eliminates specific, untainted talents who also deserve to be protected in international sport. It also violates that great presumption of innocence by pre-emptively judging the conduct of all athletes.
Hon’ble Supreme Court (Chief Justice T.S. Thakur and Judge Fakkir Mohamed Ibrahim Kalifulla) has accepted major recommendations of R M Lodha Panel’s report on BCCI, thus lays the major edifice of reformation and cleaning up of the richest cricket board BCCI. The truth is that in the modern Indian history no institution has functioned uncontrolled, above the basic democratic[Read More…]
” I go about the world, hand out-stretched, and in the stadium I plead : ‘ A pretty move, for the love of God.’ And when good football happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.” – Eduardo Galeano. Watching as a neutral spectator, this is exactly what I[Read More…]
Tinsel Gods 
Kirti Kisan Union conducts massive rally in Moga on issue of Canal Water 
The Importance of Convenient Payment Options in Enhancing Travel Experiences 
Book Review – A Reader on Financial Inclusion 
Nuclear Turns Fashionable 
Taiwan’s Quest to Upgrade Its Battle Readiness Continues to Evolve 
Trade Unions in Kenya and Britain in a Changing World 
Why Phalke Award Has Eluded Classic Hindi Cinema Heroines 
Modi in Australia: Down Under Bliss for Hindutva 
Both Blocs Behind Iron Curtain? 
Demand for scrapping of iron fortified rice distribution in India’s public food schemes intensifies 
Government destroying public spaces rather than protecting them 
Dalit agricultural labour organisations stage protests in Punjab 
The Influence of Higher Wages and Better Job Opportunities on Migration from Small Towns to Big Cities or Other Regions New Parliament building- Appearance Vs Substance 
International body slams Media Repression in Kashmir During G-20 Event 
More Than 43 Million People In Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia Suffer Due To Droughts 
Shudra Wrestlers Vs Ksatriya Controllers: The Battle For Women’s Rights 
Blindman’s Buff-America’s Continuing Quest to Hide Torture 
Ever Again – Setting the Stage for the Genocide of the Palestinian People 
Does China Have a Huge Problem Despite Impressive Economic Development? 
Capitalist Exploitation Entrenched in Kenya 
A Call for Safe and Ethical AI (Artificial Intelligence) for Health 
Farruggio for President 2024 
Cracks in India’s armoury – Achilles’ heel in the security and intelligence apparatus 
Whose Sentiments are Hurt? 
On Doing the Most Important Thing 
Inauguration of new Parliament complex on Savarkar’s birthday shall not whitewash his anti-national and anti-human crimes 
How do we know what is true? 
On 56th Anniversary of Naxalbari 
Next 5 Years Will Smash Global Temperature Records, Says WMO 
Censorship Of Stan Grant, Indigenous Australians & Palestinians, Julian Assange & Truth Tellers 
How Women Wrestlers’ Movement Has Become a Wider Symbol for Justice, Dignity and Safety for Women 
Not On Our Dime!’: Why US Democrats Are Growingly Challenging Israel 
How The U.S. War on Taiwanese Semiconductors Might Benefit Japan 
The Deplorable Work Conditions Behind Harrods’ $7,000 ‘Ambootia Snow Mist’ Darjeeling Tea 
Capturing Carbon With Machines Is a Failure—So Why Are We Subsidizing It? 
Political Illusions & 2024 Polls! 
Freedom libraries: Liberating minds for action against oppression and exploitation 
Who are the Muslims and Christians in India: Understanding the ‘Hindu’ fear of Muslims and Christians 
Our beloved K.P.Sasi is no more. Filmmaker, cartoonist, writer, mentor, friend and above all tireless activist championing the cause of every underdog, Sasi breathed his last, mid-afternoon this Christmas day – after battling a medical condition for months. I remember the last time I met him, almost exactly a month before he passed away, at the ayurvedic healing center in[Read More…]
