For a long time, badminton in India revolved around two names – Saina Nehwal and PV Sindhu. The two female protagonists shone on the world stage, also getting on the Olympic podium. But with precious little backup, India often came up short in team competitions.
The male shuttlers, in contrast, have been much less heralded. That is, till Sunday, when they achieved the almost-unthinkable by winning the Thomas Cup – the World Cup of men’s team badminton. Not just any medal, but gold!
Beating badminton royalty Malaysia, Denmark and Indonesia in successive rounds cannot be termed a flash in the pan, but the result of years of hard work and planning, often away from the media spotlight. It could take the shuttle sport, especially the men’s side, to another level and raise the level of expectations for the current and future generation of players.
Names such as HS Prannoy and Kidambi Srikanth have often been in the slipstream of the women stalwarts, even though the latter was once ranked No.1 in the world during a stellar 2017. The arrival of young gun Lakshya Sen — who reached the All England final and had a podium finish at the World Championship — and the doubles pairing of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty have rounded the squad as there are no weak links.
But from where did this all-conquering combination emerge? A lot has been said and written about the proliferation of academies around the country once badminton became a fashionable sport. Chief national coach Pullela Gopichand’s academy in Hyderabad has been a conveyor belt of high-quality talent, despite the occasional noise about conflict of interest. Add to it, the establishment in Bengaluru with Prakash Padukone at the helm, and also Vimal Kumar, and one has several legends of the sport giving back in a tangible, and measurable, manner.
There have been several retired or semi-retired players across sports promising to scout and groom talent through their academies, but one is still waiting for their wards to make their first big splash.
As far as the current glory-winning group is concerned, Srikanth and Prannoy have been around long enough to experience the ups and downs of the circuit, suffering and recovering from their fair share of injuries. While the spotlight has been on Sindhu and Saina, they have grinded out results, occasionally dealing with early exits from tournaments.
When it came to prospects at big events, the men have often been an afterthought, at least in terms of star power. But coming into the Thomas Cup, the young and the old Indian male shuttlers were quietly confident about their chances. All the teams they faced in the latter stages of the tournament had players ranked higher than them, but that hardly fazed them.
In the final, names like Jonatan Christie (2018 Asian Games gold medallist) and Anthony Ginting were put to the sword, as was the acclaimed doubles combination of Mohammad Ahsan and Kevin Sanjaya Sukamuljo. Indonesia have been perennial Thomas Cup champions, and take a lot of pride in being the numero uno country in the sport that arouses so much passion in the South-East Asian nation.
But, at least till the next edition, it will be a new country with the bragging rights in the men’s game. It is one of the most unexpected achievements, at least for those looking from the outside, but nonetheless one of the most heart-warming ones in Indian sport.
Exhorting Dalits to urbanise, Babasaheb Ambedkar had famously said “What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism.” While several positive strides have been made over the last 75 years in independent India, has urban India recovered from the “sink of localism” and “narrow mindedness”?
A joint study from 2015 to 2017, conducted by Savitribai Phule Pune University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies shows that 22.3 per cent of forward caste (FC) Hindus own 41 per cent of the country’s wealth. Using nationally representative surveys, Nitin Bharti of the Paris School of Economics has empirically demonstrated the wealth dominance of the forward castes. The top 10% (1st decile) owned nearly 60% of the urban wealth in 2012. Calculating “representational inequality”, which measures the extent of social segregation within a wealth bracket, Bharti shows that FCs dominate the richest 10% while Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims are over-represented in the bottom 50%. It would, therefore, be fair to say that property ownership by caste has merely shifted locations from rural to urban areas without commensurating socio-economic mobility of backward castes. Consequently, the rental housing market in so-called “good neighbourhoods” in urban India continues to be dominated by FCs.
I am a Dalit and I studied at the Telangana Social Welfare Residential School and then completed my Masters in 2020 from Azim Premji University. Subsequently, I started working in Bhilwara, Rajasthan, where my quest to find a rental accommodation started. Initially, I met a doctor via an online housing app. Given that I am from Telangana, he had trouble gauging my religion and caste from my surname. I acknowledged that I am a Hindu when he asked about my religion. He then veered towards my food preferences and wanted to know about my parents’occupation. Feeling uncomfortable, I started lying and put on a mask of an upper caste person. With much difficulty, I ended the conversation. Frightened, I did not approach him again.
My search continued and the general trend became obvious soon. First, I would be asked if I am a Hindu and then there would be follow-up questions about my food habits. Some were less subtle, and asked directly: ‘Kaunsa jaati hai tumhara (What is your caste)?’. I also had trouble answering questions about my ‘gotra’. In one instance, after a conversation about my native place and marital status, I said I am a Christian when the landlord asked me about my caste. Soon he said that he had already rented the house to a Brahmin family. After numerous knocks on many multi-coloured doors, a new friend assured me that he had found a house for me. Within a few minutes of our meeting, and with no sense of irony, the house owner said: ‘We are only looking for Brahmins. Are you a Brahmin?’ Before I could say anything, my friend jumped in and said “Yes, he is.” I said my mother is a school teacher and that I am a pure vegetarian. Then, the house owner asked, “What is your caste?” I mentioned a south Indian Brahmin caste name of an old friend.
The landlord then called a Brahmin couple and they asked me, “Do you belong to OBC or SC?” I responded with a plain face: “No, General Category.” After probing further, the couple finally gave up and said “Ok. Don’t cook eggs or other meat in the house.” The landlord then asked me to bring a copy of my Aadhaar card. I left with a sense of fear and repeatedly looked at details on my Aadhaar card to ensure that my caste was not mentioned on it. When I returned with my luggage, the couple came to examine my Aadhaar. I got anxious as the address on my Aadhaar said ‘Ambedkar Nagar’. But soon I realised that they could neither read English nor Telugu.
Finally, after finding a place to stay, I had to live like a typical Brahmin as people observed me all the time. But, I realised the power of being able to speak in English. Since the people around me didn’t understand the language, I started speaking in English all the time and now their questions have also reduced. My true identity remains hidden.
Mukkera Rahul Swaero is a Programme Coordinator with LibTech India in Rajasthan Suraj Yengde, author of Caste Matters, curates the fortnightly ‘Dalitality’ column
Once more last week the bulldozers rolled in Delhi destroying the lives and dreams of ordinary people. Once more battles raged over which mosque was once a Hindu temple. Into this rectification of historical wrongs were dragged the Qutub Minar and the Taj Mahal. This is a topical column, so both events necessitate a comment. On bulldozers may I say I wait eagerly for the day when bulldozers smash down the homes of those corrupt officials who permitted illegal construction on such a scale. On the triumphalist Hindutva movement that now claims that the Taj Mahal was a Hindu monument, I have one question: when do bulldozers arrive to demolish the most famous mausoleum in the world?
For those of you who think I am being frivolous about serious things, I have one response: enough is enough. For weeks, if not months, we appear to have talked of nothing else but matters of this kind, so I am going to spare you yet another piece on either bulldozers or majoritarian madness. Little more can be said that has not already been said in endless, repetitive primetime debates and endless, increasingly repetitive ponderings by political pundits.
So, this week I plan to talk of what are considered things so inconsequential that they never make headlines. My reason for doing this is that on the inside pages of newspapers appeared what to me was the most important news of all, and this is that 89% of Indian children are malnourished before they reach their second year. This information came in the recently published report of the National Family Health Survey (NHFS-5). The report concluded that there has been only marginal improvement since their findings five years ago. This is heartbreaking and shameful. Malnourishment in a child’s most formative months means that they will grow up stunted and unable ever to reach their full potential either physically or mentally.
When I asked myself why Narendra Modi who has paid so much attention to rectifying negligence of many kinds during Congress rule, I noticed that Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh were the worst offenders when it came to malnutrition in infants. Clearly, this is something he has never paid attention to. Can we hope that after this latest NFHS report from his own government, he will pay as much attention to malnutrition as he did to sanitation in his first term? Swachh Bharat achieved levels of rural sanitation on an impressive scale because Modi put his weight behind it. If he did the same to ensure that India’s children were no longer malnourished, then we might one day reap the full benefits of having the world’s largest population of young people.
There are other ‘small’ things I would like to draw attention to this week. I use the word small deliberately because Modi has shown that what he really loves are big things. The ‘tallest statue’ in the world has come up in his time. The ‘largest vaccination programme’ has been successfully achieved and these are things that the Prime Minister loves to boast about. On the day I sat down to write this piece I drove past the new Parliament building and, without being allowed to get close enough for a real inspection, can report that it already towers over every other building in its vicinity. The old Parliament, repository of so much of India’s democratic history, resembles an anthill in its mighty shadow. But I digress.
The most ignored and most horrible news of the moment is that a garbage mountain that is estimated to be more than seventeen stories high remains on fire in Delhi. It spews poisonous gases into the city’s dangerously polluted air and reminds us that although we dream of putting a man on the moon, we have failed to learn how to deal with waste. On the edge of every village, we see ditches filled with rotting garbage and nearly all our small towns have main bazaars that are, in reality, just garbage dumps. Is this not shameful at a time when we are so proudly celebrating the seventy-fifth year of India’s Independence?
Those who yell Vande Mataram and Jai Shri Ram with every breath need to read the Ramayana more carefully to discover the description of Ayodhya on the eve of Ram’s coronation. And, while they are about it, they can also pay careful attention to the road that Bharat built to go to the forest in which his brothers were forced into exile. The methods used to build the road were as modern as they are today and Ayodhya more beautiful than any modern Indian city. While Hindu revivalism is so fashionable, can we please revive some of these things? Is it not time that we ensured that Bharat Mata was no longer covered in rotting garbage? And what could be a finer tribute in this year of our Amrit Mahotsav than to ensure that no Indian child lacks the basic nutrients they need to grow to their full potential?
Can I end with a question? What happens now that a court has declared that it will not begin to discuss whether Hindutva activists should be allowed to start meddling around in those alleged ‘twenty-two sealed rooms’ in the basement of the Taj Mahal? Will Hindutva troops be unleashed in Agra to start attacking Muslims for the ‘sins’ of their ancestors? Seriously, what happens now?
In the last 10 days, the lurid fascination for Rahul Gandhi’s private life has spurred Op-Ed pieces in newspapers, righteous Tweets and drawing room debates on what exactly constitutes propriety for public figures. Everyone has an opinion on the WhatsApp forward that showed RG gazing at his phone while music was blaring and liquor flowing, ostensibly, at a nightclub in Nepal. Despite his shaky political future, the dimpled Congress scion remains mass media’s darling — a generation brought up on Instagram sees nothing wrong in compulsively trespassing on the personal space of famous people.
Whatever one’s political views, it can’t be easy being Rahul Gandhi. To have your every move dissected (and invariably) criticised in front of all and sundry — it makes one feel grateful for a humdrum existence. I know from experience that a nasty remark can weigh on one’s mind for weeks. The famous have to get used to sneering opinions cascading in relentlessly on social media; people who would probably be fawning if they came face to face become vicious, emboldened by anonymity. The jeering RG has been subjected to, is, at a deeper level, indicative of Indians’ collective fear of failure. If the Congress had been winning elections, RG’s attendance at a wedding wouldn’t be cause for comment. Since they are not, the expectation is that he should be shamefacedly hanging his head down, in hiding.
There is a tendency to believe that those born with the proverbial silver spoon are happily insulated from the vagaries of life. And they are, considering 99% of humanity is toiling away in obscurity, attempting to climb an arduous ladder to success that’s nowhere near guaranteed. Stardom, acquired or inherited, comes with significant benefits: a family name opens avenues to make money. Admiration is a boost to the ego, a great armour of defence against our embedded fears of rejection. So, considering the advantages, simplistic thinking goes, the 24/7 spotlight is a fair trade-off for awesome privilege. The desire for fame is so ubiquitous that society barely acknowledges the serious downsides.
It’s so much harder for the rich and powerful to form genuine friendships. People are either sucking up to you or basking in the glow that comes from having access to an important connection. Life without real conversations, surrounded instead by obsequious sycophants, sounds like it would be a dreadful bore. Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of fame is that nobody tells you the truth, so you start believing in the myth of your own greatness. That megalomania can insidiously creep up and take over was best articulated by Denzel Washington to Will Smith recently: “At your highest moment be careful, that’s when the devil comes for you.”
Ironically enough, the truly famous are ambivalent, rather, distraught, by constant adulation. Taylor Swift has said her greatest wish is to drive around alone. In a poignantly illuminating interview, Britney Spears related how she wore the same clothes every day, hoping that would make her “uninteresting” to paparazzi. Prince Harry fled from England. At the height of their popularity, the Beatles retreated to an ashram in Rishikesh, disillusioned by the hysteria surrounding them. All these people discovered that fame just means you get a lot of (hollow) attention. It can’t match feelings of well-being that come from being appreciated in close relationships, built the old-fashioned way, over time.
These days it’s so much easier for everyone to be famous. Exclusivity has been democratised. Sooner or later, the question is bound to arise, when everyone’s lighting up Google Trends— is anyone? It’s good that so many get to experience cheap thrills of quasi celebrity-dom. Perhaps, it’s only after a craving for prestige is satisfied, that one has the clarity to reject it completely.
The writer is director, Hutkay Films
A distinct memory for any visitor to Vadodara is likely to be of students of Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (MSUB) with their sketch pads and pencils at the railway station, at Kamatibaug (now Sayajibaug) or at the Khanderao market, sketching away. If you waited long enough at the train station, you might even become the muse of a budding artist. Such was the omnipresence of the student of the Faculty of Fine Arts (FFA) in Vadodara.
For those of us in other Faculties, getting to dance at the garba hosted by the Fine Arts Faculty during the Navratri was a privilege. Students wore everything from denims to chania cholis as they danced to the dhols.
That’s how we left our university — with memories of a free and happy space. Of the time spent hanging out on the steps of Central Hall, of the arguments with our professors, of the boisterous campaigning during student body elections and of sipping over-boiled tea in cracked cups at the college canteen.
Then May 9, 2007, happened. A mob stormed the FFA to protest against allegedly obscene depictions of Goddess Durga and Jesus Christ by a 26-year old student from Andhra Pradesh’s Mandapalli village. Srilamanthula Chandramohan work was displayed as part of the evaluation for his Master’s in Visual Arts (MVA) degree. Chandramohan’s works remain sealed in the faculty as a crime scene, unevaluated. And he, without a degree, facing two criminal cases, one for his art that allegedly promoted “enmity between different groups on grounds of religion etc” and another for attempted murder and arson in 2018, when he allegedly set fire to the V-C’s office out of frustration for not getting his marksheet.
In a sort of déjà vu, FFA saw another round of vandalism when, on May 5, an MSU syndicate member, Hasmukh Vaghela, targeted Kundan Yadav, a first-year Master’s student from Bihar for “objectionable” depiction of Hindu Gods and the Ashoka Pillar.
Leading artistes who have been associated with the FFA since its inception in 1950 as one of independent India’s first and finest schools of art, find these episodes “painful”.
They talk wistfully of a time when the late N S Bendre, who taught painting at the faculty, set up the ‘Baroda Group’ in 1956, thus shaping a generation of artistes known for their “regional modernism”, who stood out from among their peers who had trained in British-era Indian art schools. Apart from Bendre, the FFA also saw teachers such as K G Subramanyam, Bhupen Khakkar, Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh and Ratan Parimoo, each of whom came with a distinct style and school of thought.
Acharya Vinoba Bhave, Dadasaheb Phalke, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Kanhaiyalal Munshi, former RBI governor I G Patel and the 2009 Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan are among the university’s distinguished alumni.
Founded as Baroda College in 1881 by the ruler of Baroda State, Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, the university was established in 1949 by his grandson Pratapsinh Rao Gaekwad, who was also its first chancellor. Vadodara soon came to be known as a city that patronised the arts, one where freedom of thought and expression was a lived reality.
It was Sayajirao III who invited the famous Raja Ravi Varma of Travancore — the artist who is known to have been the first to give human form to Hindu Gods and Goddesses through his art — to Baroda state. The city has a gallery dedicated to Ravi Varma in the Maharaja Fatehsinh Museum.
The city’s various museums, market places and offices running out of artistic spaces designed by European architects, its palaces, its railway, its artists and its alumni, make Baroda (now Vadodara) a living gallery, somewhat like Paris’s Montmartre.
MS University’s most imposing structure is the Central Hall in the Faculty of Arts whose dome, inspired from the Gol Gumbaz of Bijapur, was designed by British architect Robert Chisholm in the Indo-Saracenic style. The original Baroda College ran out of this building.
Drawing from German universities and Banaras Hindu University, MSU is among the few unitary universities. Unlike other state universities where the governor is the chancellor, MSU, though supported by government grants, has a member of the royal family as its chancellor. The current chancellor is Rajmata Shubhanginiraje, wife of the late Ranjitsinh Gaekwad, an FFA alum himself.
The university campus, in the heart of the city in Mandvi, stretches from the Music College, now the Faculty of Performing Arts, on the banks of the 18th century Sursagar lake, to Pratapgunj, 3 km away, where the hostels are. In between are the Kalabhavan, a 1892 palace housing the Faculty of Engineering and Technology, the Faculty of Fine Arts on the banks of the Vishwamitri river, and the Faculty of Science in Pratapgunj.
There is hardly a student who has not seen the room used by poet-philosopher Sri Aurobindo in the Faculty of Arts when he was Sayajirao III’s speech writer and principal of Baroda College from 1893-1906. Aurobindo’s house in Vadodara’s Dandia Bazaar is now a national memorial.
The university is also home to the Oriental Institute, a post-graduate teaching and research space that preserves rare manuscripts with their translations.
Yet, it’s FFA that stands out as the university’s biggest centrepiece. An academic catalogue on the MSU website says FFA has produced some of the “best-known artistes of the country”. It goes on to say: “Emphasis is laid on creative identity of students and teachers to foster an approach to the study and practice of art which is inquiring, experimental and research minded”.
But with every clash, every assault on creativity such as the recent one, that space for “experimental and research-minded” art shrinks somewhat.
Misra, Resident Editor, Gujarat, is an alumnus of MS University