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Aadmi Hai ke Self Goal!
 Five of the
players who were part of the 1968 Hockey Olympics hailed from
Sansarpur, the karambhoomi of a large number of joysticks men,
recall a very touching tale about their return after winning the
bronze medal. By today's standards, it would have been a good
achievement. With hindsight, it would have been a great achievement.
But in those
days, standards were different. We hadn't progressed so much. So
winning a bronze was pretty down market, and heart breaking too.
"We all returned
in the dead of the night, afraid that we should not run into some
villagers who will curse us for not being even finalists, and when I
finally met someone, he asked me if that was how we learnt hockey. I
was told to be ashamed, and I was," Col Balbir Singh recalls, adding
the fate of his friends (the other) Balbir Singh (Punjab Police),
Jagjit Singh, Tarsem Singh and Ajit Singh was no different.
Balbir Singh and
his friends did not have a KPS Gill to defend them, or he would have
proved that winning the gold was somehow a shameless thing. Since
standards have since changed, the possible KPS line currently is
that perhaps winning or even qualifying has become some kind of a
shameless activity, so he has done everything in the book, and
outside it, to destroy the very spirit of hockey.
 The man knows
his business. Having destroyed the soul of human rights campaign in
Punjab, having destroyed the very kernel of being a Sikh, having
been convicted in a case of moral turpitude and remaining shameless
about it, and having defended the grossest of the human rights
violators like Ajit Singh Sandhu, this is the final disgraced adieu
phase of KPS Gill, his moustache still rolled upward.
If a man's
measure lay in the moustache, people would have found salvation in a
bottle of gel. The banh-maror muchh-maror sardar-looking man
has turned out to be a puny little fellow who rollicks in a mess
that he creates with aplomb and has still to meet life and principle
even decades after landing amongst us. Of course, the official
Indian establishment needs him. Regimes always need fiddlesticks to
kill the spirit of joysticks.
The inglorious
and unprecedented exit of the team even before the start of the 2008
Olympic Games in Beijing is a black-letter day for the sport. The
team is out of the Olympic Games for the first time since making
their debut at the 1928 Amsterdam Games.
 Somehow, Punjab
and Sikhs have always closely associated themselves with the sport.
The dribbling men with the curved stick, a white hankey covering the
hairbun on the head told the world about the presence of Sikhs all
across the world in pre and post astro-turf period. From their debut
appearance at
Amsterdam
under the peerless Dhyan Chand, the team reeled off six straight
gold medals till the streak was broken by Pakistan at the 1960 Rome
Olympics. In 1968 came the bronze and in 2008 the shame. There will
be talk about rule changes and transition towards the more powerful
European style of play, but the fact remains that it has been more
an issue of management and less an issue of hockey.
India has
ensured that KPS became bloated, larger than life figure. So it has
to park him somewhere. No state government wants him. The Centre's
attempts to foist him as a governor or a security advisor have been
resisted by state after state. The Indian Hockey Federation was a
convenient spot in the parking lot of bloated Indian figureheads,
and KPS has stuck to his post like shame sticks to the devil.
To succeed, a
sport needs success. To fail, and fail utterly, it needs a KPS Gill.
Fix him anywhere, the man never lets you down, he ensures you never
get up again. Aadmi hai ke self goal!
12
March 2008
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