Since yesterday I have seen numerous updates on Facebook from my friends, most of them feeling proud, or happy that India kept our pride. The same pride which was lost in CWG mess till last week. News channels have been running stories since past 2 months on this dwindling state of Indian pride which gets lost every second day and gets restored every now and then. What I do not understand that how can pride of our country be related to this 12 day event, what does successfully hosting or not hosting an event has to do with Indian pride. I do not think that Indian pride is that shallow that we need to organize a sporting event by spending thousands of crores of our taxpayers money abysmally (that too when 42% of its population is below international poverty line) for proving it to the world.
Since there are already numerous arguments, evidences against this extravaganza so I will list my points later for the same, I would like to counter the arguments in favour of organizing these games first. The first and foremost reason has been cited as the national pride, which I do not buy to. If they really wanted to showcase Indian pride, they should resolve the issues of terrorism that are coming up in every corner of the country(as per latest reports 232 of India’s 608 districts are affected by some form of terrorism and as per number of deaths in last 4 years we are second only to Iraq) if the political aspirations of our leaders are preventing them from doing so they can work on other areas such as lowering the poverty, lowering the infant mortality and malnutrition rate in India I think these issues are much more valuable to our national pride than these silly games.
Secondly so called advantage is that this will attract foreign destination, can somebody please tell me how is that possible as the inefficiency of this great Indian bureaucracy which was under the wraps (or assumed to be so) till now is out in the open. A place where a roll of toilet paper costs 3 grand, a place where spending 70,000 crore for a 20,000 crore event can’t even ensure its success, a place where of all people prime minister has to call in to get few condos cleaned up, a place where hygiene standard is as good as dog shit on bed and a country which is marred by terrorism needs to call army to build a bridge for which the contractor took seven years and 5 crore rupees (though army built it in 4 days and at a fraction of original cost) do we really expect foreign companies to come for business here?
Third and the most widely cited reason is the development that is associated with this. Well it surely can’t be development of the country or common man for that matter but yes if they are referring to those involved in this, those lucky goons who got thousands of crores in their pockets along with sufficient time to clean up their traces then I will surely agree on this. The games in Manchester in 2002 is what we were promised, where whole of east Manchester(which was in depression due to unemployment caused by pull out of numerous industries) was developed and it resulted in employment and development of that area. But what we got was a village which was build in an already developed area (and a congested one too) and which is not ecologically sound as well, so much so that the proposal was out rightly rejected by the environment ministry but eventually they had to give in to the whims and fantasies of those organizing the event.
And finally as far as development in sports is concerned we organized Asian games in 1982 and spent huge amount of money on building stadia, but it had no impact on our medal tally in any event till now. So behind all this glamour and lights there is a lot of mess that needs to be cleaned up, a lot of questions that needs to be asked but the problem is who is going to do so, as the citizens of this country are soaked in pride and waiting for India to bid for Olympics.
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