I’ve known for a while that India does poorly in the Olympics, but I had never realized exactly how poorly:
The world’s second most populous nation … ranks dead last worldwide in the number of Olympic medals won per capita. Paraguay, Niger and Iraq have done better. [Link]
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p designtimesp=”3266″>This statistic seems to only count countries that have won at least one medal, which leaves India better off than countries without medals, but that’s slim consolation.
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p designtimesp=”3268″>Now it may be unfair to compare medals on a per capita basis since that pits India against countries much smaller in population size and Olympic winnings are hard to scale up. However, even if you look at the two largest countries in the world, China has won over 100 times as many medals as India in the past few decades:
Since 1984, when China rejoined the Olympic Games after decades of isolation, the Asian superpower has won 320 medals. India, its political and economic rival, has won three… [Link]And in a century of Olympics, India has won just 16 medals (fewer than that other nation of a billion, China, typically wins at a single [sic] Games) and only eight in the last 50 years. [Link]
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p designtimesp=”3277″>But, you object, China has a communist-era olympic medal factory which even tries to breed athletes. Fair enough, but even amongst Commonwealth countries in general, India lags so far behind that the officials of the Commonwealth Games have scolded India for not doing enough to avoid embarrassment when it next hosts the games in 2010 [Link]. No matter how you cut it, India is at the bottom of sporting countries worldwide.
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p designtimesp=”3281″>It is true that India does better in some sports than in others, but India’s best sports all require little physical exertion:
“India is doing very well in chess. And pretty well at cue sports like billiards and snooker. And for the past couple of years, Indian golfers have done very well on the Asian circuit…” [Link]
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p>The fact is that the Indian government has (perhaps rightly) never invested in sports, and what they spend has a low ROI:
“There are a lot of other priorities, like education and electricity,” said Indian Olympic Association Secretary General Randhir Singh. India does funnel a respectable amount of money toward its sports federations… [but] India’s sports centers spend much of their budget on salaries for bureaucrats, while athletes complain about lack of money for track improvements, coaches and better running shoes. [Link]
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p designtimesp=”3290″>And market incentives are entirely oriented towards producing cricket stars, so sports with few viewers languish:
But perhaps the biggest reason India can’t achieve Olympic fame is cricket… Over the years, it has become India’s only important sport. As a result, a huge share of corporate sponsorship money goes to the cricket stars, and every athletically minded kid dreams of being one of them. In India’s villages, few kids play soccer or run races. Instead they play cricket. [Link]
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p designtimesp=”3294″>Outside of cricket, things are pretty much teh suck:
The painful truth is India is rubbish at pretty much every other game. It has no football team worthy of the name, ranking 142nd in the world, behind the Maldives (paradise-island nation, pop. 339,330). Its rugby squad lost 78-3 in a recent match in England, to Pershore (pleasant market town, pop. 7,304). [Link]
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p designtimesp=”3298″>Culture also plays a role – Pakistan and Sri Lanka also do poorly in the Olympics and poor Bangladesh has yet to pick up a single medal. And again, without much of a market for domestic sports aside from cricket, parents have no incentive to push their children the way parents in America do:
“In India, parents do not encourage their children to play games. That’s a big handicap,” the Olympic Association’s Singh said. “But if there’s no money in sport, no parent wants his child to waste his time…” [Link]
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p designtimesp=”3302″>Lastly, consider the graph at the bottom of the post which shows that Indian men are the most virginal in the world [via Manish]. In America every young man knows that scoring on the field will help him score off it. There’s a reason why most sports involve getting a ball in a net / goal past a tenacious defender and you don’t need to be Freud to see it.
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p designtimesp=”3305″>But in India, where the average male loses his virginity at 19, incentives are different. Doing well at field hockey wont help you win the heart of fair maiden, but getting into engineering school might help you marry a cuter (less homely) girl when it comes time for your marriage to be deranged.
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p designtimesp=”3306″>So here’s my question — Is there is a way to increase India’s medal booty, and should India even try?
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p designtimesp=”3309″>After all, India is 10th in the world in world records, and has a very healthy sense of national self esteem:
the “2003 Global Attitudes survey found India was the most nationalistic place on earth, with 74% of respondents ‘completely agreeing’ that Indian culture is superior. “[cite].
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p designtimesp=”3315″>India excels in plenty of areas, like patents filed, fastest 10 miles skipped, and number of men singing and dancing on screen while wearing fugly costumes. Should we even try to second-guess India’s priorities?
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p>Related posts: American investing $120M to train Indians for Olympics, If not Torino, then where? and Desi athletes take the gold.
of course it is possible and feasible to attain the same balance of nutrients from vegetable products as from a more omnivorous diet. but i think that sort of complementation takes a bit more forethought and often more consumer choice. i have a friend who doesn’t like green vegetables. so he doesn’t eat them; he takes a big green supplement in the morning. lucky he can afford something like that.
Razib,
Amen!
Didn’t mean to imply otherwise…. I was focussed on abd’s–small set,all things considered.
I think you can have a healthy productive life, intellectually and physically, without eating meat. However this would require intense levels of diet planning and supplementation, which ordinary people, and particularly poor ordinary people, are not going to invest in. After all, villagers in India have neither the knowledge or resources to analyze, pick and order the correct dietary supplementation. Therefore the simplest, and most sustainable solution, is to encourage dietary improvement through the increased consumption of available animal products.
not really. i know what you mean, and especially in the USA it seems like this is true. but the reason i have started harping on the malnutrition angle it is shocking how repulsively crappy india’s human capital is.
well perpsective. the malnutrition rate was 70% in the 70s and literacy like 35%. the problem is it didnt improve the way China did, but that doesnt mean its all negative
btw, small cocks, no athleticism, tendency toward virginity and low measured IQs on psychometric tests on average (yes, from lynn and vanhanen, but they reported/collated a number of studies which converged upon scores in the low 80s from india, south africa, mauritius, etc. UK browns did better i believe, and USA browns are above 100). we should win the darwin awards! 😉
Damn you and your privilege–my Dads didn’t make bank ’til I was 29!! 🙂
Therefore the simplest, and most sustainable solution, is to encourage dietary improvement through the increased consumption of available animal products.
well, milk. though a large proportion of south asians don’t exhibit lactase persistence, especially in the south. that means they’ll miss out on 1/3 of the nutritive capacity.
the malnutrition rate was 70% in the 70s and literacy like 35%. the problem is it didnt improve the way China did, but that doesnt mean its all negative
if your absolute score within the class increases on a test but you still set the bottom of the curve because everyone did better should you be happy? i guess it’s a matter of perspective.
if your absolute score within the class increases on a test but you still set the bottom of the curve because everyone did better should you be happy? i guess it’s a matter of perspective.
South Asia will be 25 years late, chalk it up to Indian Standard time, though depressingly I read somehwere that literacy is falling in pakistan.
haha rob…i just meant enough $$ to buy multiple shots
Lynn and Vanhannen is just too full of holes, radical speculation, and just bad science to really consider their results as any kind of evidence. That said, I don’t doubt that malnourished kids are going to score a lot worse on iq tests, and there evidently are a lot of malnourished kids in India.
IQ itself is a flawed method. The brain is the most complex organ of our bodies that we know the least about. Trusting one metric (IQ) to measure this complex thing we dont understand to begin with, must be questioned. Has the IQ measurement method evolve any or whatever we needed to research in terms of making this metric has been done and there is no need to improve.
IQ itself is a flawed method.
no, i really don’t think so. it correlates pretty highly with predicting a lot of life outcomes and competencies (which is why places like mckinsey ask for standardized test scores during the interivew process). people are pretty selective about it, most liberals i know don’t believe in IQ except when it shows that george w. bush was a ret*rd and clinton was a genius, or that people who live in republican states are morons as opposed to democrats. in any case, we can take IQ off the table. my only point is that brown people should chill on the “we so good at chess and science” schtick when most are probably functionally illiterate. if you are a malayali or an iyer or a parsi (if you consider them brown) you can chest-thump all you want of 😉 but most brown people don’t fall into those categories.
From a Pune study, low birth rate meant you lost five or six points in IQ – bad but not earth shattering?
http://www.indianpediatrics.net/july1999/july-669-676.htm
AGA = Appropriate for gestational age. SGA = Small for gestational age.
Chess is not a sport by any definition as far as I’m concerned. I wish Indians would stop thinking of it as one (I know, I know, it needs ‘mental toughness’).
The other thing that people are overlooking…maybe we’re just not an inherently athletic people (with many notable exceptions of course)…look at the high numbers of kids wearing glasses for example. Also, the mental aspects of competition, aggression, and the drive to win seem to be lacking to an extent (varies from region to region though)…this could have genetic as well as cultural components. I think what we ARE well-designed for is surviving famines and managing to live a long time even without food…which are the same traits that get us in trouble when we overeat or have rich food all the time (i.e. higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, obesity, etc). Maybe we just don’t have what it takes to compete with the Whites and the Blacks of this world. I know that in the gym, a lot of Indian guys lift weights, including myself, and although results are certainly achieved, muscle mass gained, strength increases made, but compared to the brute strength of some of the non-desis, we’re still not there (I recognise that not every sport needs brute strength… but many desis lack great coordination, stamina, and speed too (and that’s important in sports as well… )
In early 2000 I witnessed the sad spectacle of Andrew Leipus trying to get the ridiculously arrogant and pathetic Indian cricket team players to weight train. Before he came along India’s most elite and celebrated group of athletes did not workout in the gym at all!
Lack of interest and knowledge in physical fitness is probably the main reason why India sucks as sports. Most of the coaches have no idea what they are doing.
Other reasons why Indians do bad at sports listed (in no particular order):
Also steroids are not the reason India does bad at sports, in fact quite the opposite. Indians have benefited from their liberal steroid usage. Indian women particularly (steroids are more effective on women) in the 70s and 80s were doing pretty well as the Western atheletes back then did not use steroids as much.
Razib..youre being a bit unfair. There are numerous other brown success stories…bengalis, for example have a right intellectual tradition. IQ is definitely a valid measure of certain abilities, although the term intelligence quotient is inappropriate. While verbal iq, for example, might correlate with visio-spatial iq, they are not always found together. So people can have different iqs based on the type of test. But IQ is very important in this discussion, because of the evidence such tests present in showing that subcontinental people are not reaching their biological potential.
From a Pune study, low birth rate meant you lost five or six points in IQ – bad but not earth shattering?
5-6 points isn’t trivial, it’s 1/3 of a standard deviation. additionally, it might mean a world of difference in the distribution if you think about its total effect.
I think what we ARE well-designed for is surviving famines and managing to live a long time even without food…which are the same traits that get us in trouble when we overeat or have rich food all the time (i.e. higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, obesity, etc).
i think there is something to this. south asians have had a low protein diet since the agricultural revolution. different populations metabolize starch different. but the genes probably can’t explain all of it.
There are numerous other brown success stories…bengalis, for example have a right intellectual tradition.
you mean brahmins, kayasthas baidyas. let’s stay serious here, that’s a very small slice of the bengali population. i don’t mean to imply that the low 80s is the “natural” IQ of these groups. they’re starved, stressed and aren’t very literate. but let’s not conflate the educated slice with the norm. it isn’t.
While verbal iq, for example, might correlate with visio-spatial iq, they are not always found together.
jews tend to do relatively well on verbal IQ tests (as much as 2 standard deviations above the norm), and have poorer visuo-spatial IQs than gentile whites (.3 standard deviations below the norm). east asians tend to do well on the visuo-spatial, and that is the main reason their average IQ is a bit higher than whites.
Amitabh, You seem like a smart guy, but WTF–we rule because of our intelligence–why are you even bringing this up…
Coming back to “should India even try?”
I would argue — NO. Getting lots of medals would mean creating a professional sports culture which India does not have. Professional sports is not particularly healthy — atheletes push their body past 100% to be the best. I do not fancy a culture where there are hundreds of elite atheletes and thousands of broken down wannabes and millions of people who do not even try. It is not helping the US and I do not see how it will benefit India.
Besides India does not truly care about competitive sports. Any parent would trade in a son who is a gifted athelete for a decent software engineer. Hav’nt most of us had friends who were exceptional sportsmen at the interschool/district level who dropped sports completely from 8 or 9th grade?
On the other hand the government should encourage more sports in general, in the K-12 system, with a focus on health and fitness (especially making the P.T. Classes meaningful). This could include focussing on Yoga, kabaddi, etc, instead on wasting money on Olympic sports.
From a Pune study, low birth rate meant you lost five or six points in IQ – bad but not earth shattering?
For an individial person, this may not be earth shattering. For example lets say Ramanujan the meat eater would have had a 170-iq, but instead being vegeterian he had a 162 IQ. No big deal, he still turns mathematics on its head. For a population, this difference is very significant. There will be signigicantly fewer geniuses on the high end, and a much larger population of incompetents on the other.
It is kind of pathetic that the second most populous country comes in last place — but India has far bigger problems than the olympics to think about.
It’s per capita.
115
This Cynthian business in an on-going SM gag, right?
It is kind of pathetic that the second most populous country comes in last place — but India has far bigger problems than the olympics to think about.
yeah, i think the key issue is that it is a ‘canary in the coal mine’ possibly. that is, if you have 1 billion people, disproportionate number of them young, but you can’t represent against nations like nicaragua….
Yeah but I am being half serious this time.
It is outrageous that India’s national cricket team did not regularly weight train till the year 2000. How can you expect other sports to do well ?
I honestly don’t think genetics is a major issue. Most Indian Americans are geeks and have bad genetics from an athletic POV but that doesn’t mean that Indians have no potential.
Well Dizzydesi, I will one day be an indian parent, and I definitely WOULD NOT trade in an athletically gifted child for a software engineer. Its definitely not true that Indians do not care about sports. My entire family is filled with engineers, lawyers, doctors and businessmen….but for generations they have always had a passion for sports. Whenever anybody had any true sporting talent they were/are always encouraged to develop it fully.
More importantly it is unfair that little Indian kids cannot look to the rest of the world as physical equals, and whatever anyone says lack of global athletic success does engender feelings of inferiority. It therefore should most definitely be an objective of ‘india,’ whatever that is, to encourage athletic success.
“Behold the mighty Englishman. He rules the Indian small,. Because, being a meat-eater,. He is five cubits tall. “
Doggerel verse taught to schoolboys in the 1880s Gujarat, as reported by Mahatma Gandhi in his autobiography.
And the canard lives on 125 years later , just as vigorous and widespread as ever, judging from this thread. To me, the persuasive hypothesis here is the one about a small difference in population mean performance making a huge difference in results. Asian (i.e. in the broad geographic sense) records in athletics, especially track and field, lag significantly behind world records, often barely reaching standards set in Western competition several decades ago. A look at the Asian games records easily confirms this.
The Indian records are generally lower than Asian records. Combine those two facts, and India gets nowhere in the medals chart every four years in the Olympics.
However, cultural factors do play a big role, methinks. Few schools, other than elite schools have anything like established sports programmes, and fewer still have experienced coaches that can spot talent. Even so, beyond the high school level, organized sports does exist, in the military, in company-sponsored sports clubs, and in universities, a large enough population, one would think, to produce at least a few Olympians. And so it does, though almost none of them ever make it to the top three in any competition. It would be much more interesting to see how large the Indian contingent of Olympian athletes has been over the years-respectably large, if I recall correctly-and what proportion of that were serious contenders in their events. e.g. how many of them made it to the final four, or final eight, or whatever relevant level, in any of the events.
Razib, I usually agree with you, but please–Olympics marks nothing interesting in terms of real human accomplishment–I revel in desis doing “badly” at it– shows we’re serious people.
So rob. According to you Americans and Europeans are not serious people? If being not serious can produce living conditions like those in the western world…then I would hope Indians get less serious in the future.
still, the point isn’t that the nation should all of a sudden focus on only athletic endeavors and forsake bigger problems. There’s money and entertainment to be had in developing private leagues. I spent nearly all of today watching football and a good chunk of my friends spent all of yesterday doing so as well. I think most people find America’s obsession with sports pretty healthy and in general a boon to the economy.
In terms of being a software engineer over an athlete, they’re not mutually exclusive. You can manage being a good athlete and intelligent person at the same time just like you can be in the drama club or play violin and study. And many of the benefits of sports are completely ignored in such discussions (and are applicable in academics or other areas)–i know in middle school, high school and college i greatly benefited from the teamwork and coaching in the sports i played. I also learned how to take a hit and get over myself when I messed up or took a particularly hard hit (in some cases literally). On top of that you need perseverance, hard work and usually need to think on your feet to succeed at sports as well (for all the stereotypes of the dumb jock football players, you should take a look at what a pac-10 playbook looks like).
Encouraging more competitive sports at all levels in India would probably benefit all those except those who have to struggle for subsistence.
Has anyone heard of Premchand Degra.(Mr.Universe)? Kush Tandon.pakistanis being more athletic is a myth, similar to all South Indians being vegetarian. They finished 6th in the hockey Asia cup which India won yesterday.We thrash them in football too everytime,even though we are ranked so very low.How can you overlook a Dhyanchand or a Dhanraj Pillai? In cricket Pakistanis are considered the worst fielders.Ofcouse Indians are the the next worst . India has had athletes like Milkha Singh,PT Usha,Shiny Abraham,Karnam Malleshwari etc.Pakistan hasn\’t had any. India also has had great badmninton players like Prakash Paduokone and Pullela gopichand. And badminton is a more demanding game than squash. The shuttle cock is the fastest projectile amongst all sports(bar shooting).
outdoor sports make you darker. could that be an issue? i had a friend whose mom kept complaining about how field hockey practice made her black….
premchand degra?
maybe the getting laid correlation doesn’t work that well http://www.daijiworld.com/images1/excl_rohan_2807-3.jpg
he definitely has a small peeper
general question:
how do you explain scandanavia’s domination at the top of this list? http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/spo_sum_oly_med_all_tim_percap-medals-all-time-per-capita
Kush Tandon.pakistanis being more athletic is a myth, similar to all South Indians being vegetarian.
All your examples in your comment are correct and to the point, pehalwan. I wasn’t doing India-Pakistan comparison.
In earlier comment, I myself brought Sania Mirza, and Anju George, who both are South Indian athletes. A person like Sania Mirza will probably rise in her career, she could easily move tier up in ATP rankings, let’s hope.
Before, I made the comments, there was general tone of the various comments were that they were no world-class athletes from Indian subcontinent, period.
I just pointed a few female athletes, and the Khan family. Not an exhaustive list, or any comparison.
no–I’m just saying that sports is a “fillip”–cool if you can afford it, but not something to focus on.
Chess, Billiards, Snooker and Golf are not sports they are games. We might as well call Monopoly and Scrabble sports.
As some one who did year 10 and 12 in India, you really have no time for anything other than studying from year 8-12. A typical day would in year 10 would be as follows Wake up 5:30am school Bus 6:30 am, reach school at 7:10 am School Assembly 7:20 am, school finishes at 1:05pm, reach home by 1:20 (use rikshaw and don’t waste time on the bus), stuff food down your throat, pack your bag and go to English language and social science tuitions at 2pm come home by 3:15 pm. Do homework for an hour and half, get a rickshaw for Hindi and Marathi language tuitions at 5 pm to 6pm. rush for 6:30 to 8pm Maths and Science tuitions, reach home exhausted, stuff food in your mouth, complete school home work due for the next day by 11 pm and sleep. Some of the homework would be completed on school bus and at times just rely on your friendship with the class prefect checking your homework not to dob you in. If you can fit time to kick a football in this schedule, you deserve a medal.
Every one in school in these days goes for tuitions and the school teachers know that, they themselves teach in tuitions or classes and thus concentrate less on schools. The so called good schools in Mumbai who get 100% results at the board exams rely on tuitions and detaining (failing) weak students before year 10. In my batch the class strength was reduced by 15 students who they though would risk the 100% school record.
\”he definitely has a small peeper\”
@ceblast An alpha male sure brings out the insecurity in you.Huh? Well Mr.blast this guy has huge legs and they make his big peeper looks little. Whereas your bird legs make your little weiner look a little bigger.Simple
“according to nation master india is #11 is % of under 5 who are stunted from malnutrition. 46%. shit, bangladesh at 45% is doing better (though i wouldn’t be surprised if this is because of more infant mortality or lying). if you’re in the same league as bangladesh in a health metric you definitely don’t have your shit together”
For South Asia:
5 – Nepal (51%)
11 – India (46%)
13 – Bangladesh (45%)
31 – Pakistan (37%)
60 – Maldives (25%)
91 – Sri Lanka (14%)
Yay Sri Lanka is at #91
shit. you figured it out. i’m afraid of big manly phalluses.
It’s stems from an affliction i had in childhood where all i could draw were penises.
First we had Fair and Lovely.
Then we had Fair and Handsome.
Now we will have Fair and Athletic?
Good grief!
What about book cricket?
@ceblast
your affliction is \”pigeon legs\” (read inferiority complex) not \”love for the phallus\”
If you go to India, you’d find kids playing in every gali-mohalla. Its not that kids refuse to play or are simply not allowed to play: sports is not treated seriously as a profession, and also sporting accomplishments carry less cachet. Sports is play.
But its true there’s a break from sports for many DBD kids, where they go out of circulation for 2-3 years when they prepare for the competitive exams. Its possible many of them never take up sports again after the break.
This is so very true. It usually starts around 14-15 and by the time you are done, you are already 17-18, and busy in college and life moves on without turning back. But I think it applies only to people who would have at best made mediocre athletes(by intl standards) in any case. Because, if this were the only problem and everything else is perfect, I think an “olympic talented” athlete would very likely discover that he should fancy sports over academics by the time he is 14-15. So this may not apply as a serious argument imho.
“What about book cricket?”
Thanks for the link. Good read!
no wonder you get penalized for grabbing the rim.
I agree, though there can be cases where v talented kids may not realize their true potential when they are 14-15, or might just give in to family pressure(there are no athletic scholarships in India, so absolutely no incentive to take sports seriously). But it might explain Salil’s point in #30 that Indians generally do not seem to be interested in getting a sweat going.
outdoor sports make you darker. could that be an issue? i had a friend whose mom kept complaining about how field hockey practice made her black….
If you go to India, you’d find kids playing in every gali-mohalla. Its not that kids refuse to play or are simply not allowed to play: sports is not treated seriously as a profession, and also sporting accomplishments carry less cachet. Sports is play.
But its true there’s a break from sports for many DBD kids, where they go out of circulation for 2-3 years when they prepare for the competitive exams. Its possible many of them never take up sports again after the break. Sakshi is right.
Countries that have strong athletic showing have long tradition – be it runners from Finland, East Africa, sprinters from Caribbean, soccer in Brazil and western Europe, or massive state support like in former Communist countries. In America, sports have strong roots with the working class (baseball), and the inner cities (basketball, boxing), and it resonates deeply with African Americans.
A lot of promising athletes and sportsman stop practicing for search of steady income careers in India. In past, sportsperson (non-cricket) were given dead end jobs in India. But then Jesse Owens here too ran against trains and horses to put feed himself after Berlin Olympics.
Walk in any corner in India, you will see kids playing cricket, or even soccer, or kho-kho, or kabadhi (this proves Sir Salil totally wrong). In some sense Kerala is an anomaly, where they have athlete families – Anju George belongs to one of them. Like the Khan family in Pakistan, they are rich enough now to support their supremacy in squash for 5 decades. Food on the table is not a problem. The state itself does not provide world class facilities in India, or in other South Asian countries. There are some exceptions, cricket, and squash (Pakistan International Airlines is very committed to squash).
Razib, whilst your anecdote, might be true, of some family you know in States and but has no bearing to billions in India, and the neighboring country.
Even though I haven’t seen Chak de India, but what I read touches the true nerve in neglect for sports other than cricket.
But then cricket == Rs., Rs., a lots of them.