Hockey: No national fame, only national shame

Vinit Sharma, a lanky college graduate looking for a job, loves playing tennis and cricket, enjoys watching F1 racing and dreams of dating Maria Sharapova. Vinit has never in his lifetime spent even fifteen continuous minutes watching a live game of hockey either at a stadium or on television. Except for the legendary Dhyanchand whose exploits he recollects reading in his school textbooks, the mercurial Dhanraj Pillay whose name keeps popping up in newspapers due to his controversial statements and Mir Negi, the goalkeeper who has been enjoying fame and adulation ever since the release of the blockbuster 'Chak De', Vinit doesn't know of any other hockey player, Indian or international, of past or present. His knowledge of the game is rudimentary and while he is aware that hockey is our national sport, he has no idea why it is so. Like every good citizen, Vinit believes the government must have had a very good reason for nominating hockey as a national game ahead of cricket and hasn't bothered to find out himself why our government has selected hockey despite the overwhelming popularity of cricket.

Yet despite his lack of awareness about the game of hockey, Vinit Sharma joined millions of Indians in denouncing the poor state of Indian hockey after India failed to qualify for Olympics and demanded that KPS Gill, head honcho of Indian hockey resign as chief of hockey federation. Vinit like thousands of other overnight fans of hockey asked - Is hockey our national game or our national shame?

Rahul Pundit, a twenty-six year old guy working for a multi-national bank is slightly more aware about India's rich hockey legacy and knows why hockey was chosen as our national game ahead of cricket, but like Vinit Sharma he can only recollect three hockey players - Dhyanchand, Dhanraj Pillay and Mir Negi. He vaguely recalls some names like Pargat, Joginder, Jaspal - playing for India, but apart from familiar sounding names he doesn't know anything else about any player. Rahul, like Vinit, found the news of India's inability to qualify for Olympics hard to swallow and asked the same question with slight modification - Has our national game become our national shame?

On the other hand, both Vinit and Rahul are not only able to retrieve from their memory banks the names of all Indian cricket players who have donned national colors in last few years, they are also able to remember the composition of every team playing for Indian Premier League (IPL). Yet neither the duo nor thousands of experts, journalists, sports commentators and enthusiasts have ever wondered why cricket is not our national game.

According to some sports commentators, cricket replaced hockey as our national sport way back in 1971 when a 21-year old, Sunil Gavaskar blasted four centuries against the formidable windies on their own soil. By the time Indian cricket team won its first world cup in 1983, hockey had been completely erased from national consciousness. After the world cup victory cricket mania swept the nation and the mania has never abated except for brief periods when Indian cricket team performed as dismally as our hockey team.

Over three and a half decades have gone past since hockey lost its crown, but experts, journalists, sports commentators and millions of Vinits and Rahuls of India still continue to believe hockey is our national game, since the sports ministry of Indian government has not bothered to notify to the nation that hockey is no longer our national game.

"Only the government of India should have the power to decide what our national game - or for that matter our national anthem, song, animal, bird, insect, flower, vegetable, fruit, tree, plant, mineral, rock, chemical element - should be. Since our government has mandated hockey as our national game, then national game it will continue to be" says Pradeep Paperwalla, sports correspondent of Hindustan Times. "As long as it continues to be our national game, we have a right to declare it as our national shame whenever our hockey team performs abysmally"

Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyer, minister of youth affairs and sports ruled out taking the game of hockey off from its pedestal and replacing cricket as our national game. "We have won eight Olympic gold medals in hockey which is a national record. Cricket on the other hand is not even an Olympic sport. Let cricket make its way into the Olympic games. After our cricket team brings back home its ninth gold medal in the Olympics, our ministry will definitely consider mandating cricket as our national game" said the minister.

Meanwhile the temperamental hockey striker, India's former hockey captain, Dhanraj Pillay has sparked off another controversy by demanding that either hockey players be compensated as handsomely as cricket players or the game should be repealed as our national game. "Hockey players are not compensated well enough in exchange of being branded as 'national shame'. We get no lucrative contracts from advertisers, we don't have professional league teams buying us for crores of rupees and worse, people don't even recognize us on streets. If we are not considered important enough to deserve national fame, why should we be considered important enough to deserve national shame?