Too geeky or too snooty?

Considered as a whole, South Asia is easily the world’s most populous entity, with India and Pakistan alone accounting for well over a billion people. So how come there are so few desi sportspersons of any note (barring our cricketing demigods, of course)? There was a time when our part of the world was home to some of the top wrestlers and (field) hockey players. Some Pakistanis have dominated squash in recent times, and India produces a promising tennis player now and again. But going by Olympics medal tallies, our countries do a rather poor job indeed.

Now this is puzzling from a purely logical, statistical point of view. If one assumes, as one ought to, that the distribution of sporting talent follows normal patterns, we ought to have thousands of champions in most sports in our midst. Whereas, all we seem to produce in prodigious numbers, is IT wizards (not that I’m complaining, they are the ones who give us Trueroots, among other things). But I do wonder why we cannot be any more than the geeks at the backend of the world!

We have some truly revolutionary litterateurs and poets. Our artists are second to none. Our beauty queens are not even news any more. And our entrepreneurs are knocking on some of the stoutest doors in the West. Which means that in most other areas of human endeavour, we have our share excellence. So why are we rubbish with racquets, wasted in the water, feckless on the field and trash on the track?

I suspect it’s because we’ve taken our image as erudite products of ancient civilisations too seriously. Are we too bloody snooty to get down and dirty (not to mention sweaty) with sport? Weren’t we all told by well-meaning elders to put the ball away and get back to the books? Well guess what, mom? We did get back to the books. We did become engineers. We’re the ones if you want to work out the trajectory of a ball, applying ballistics and calculus while it is still in flight. But if you want that ball hit over into the bleachers, you’d better hire an American. Or an Australian. Or someone from China.

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