It is common to have books coming out on an event just after it has taken place. Authors have fallen over one another to have theirs out on the global financial crisis, the Ambani brothers’ feud, the Indian Premier League, the Satyam financial scandal, and so on.
Rare is the book that comes out before an event. And rarer is the one that comes out at a time when fresh news — a beehive of controversy at that — is tumbling out every day about the subject of the book. That is why we have sensational portions of a book selectively leaked around its launch. The idea is to keep it in currency. In that sense, the authors of this book have been singularly lucky. Or maybe not.
There is much that is good in this book, in addition to the timing. It is full of research. It has several useful tables flaunting interesting numbers. The opening sections can stagger you with their account of the costs, which have ballooned from the original estimate of about $1.3 billion to $15 billion — a 10-fold jump. That will make this Commonwealth Games seven times more expensive than Melbourne in 2006 and clearly the most expensive Games in history. The authors have kept the scale of the book wide. And, of course, it is as topical as can be.
That last bit is also a problem.
The authors point out that these Games are not really about medals. They are about showing off India’s prowess at organising an event. The Games were to establish India’s ability to produce the best-ever Games. These Games were meant to be a resounding repartee to China, which had its own coming-out party with the Beijing Olympics two years ago. Just as the Olympics did for Beijing, these Games were meant to finally convince the world of New Delhi’s new status as a global economic and political power. Instead, the preparations stuttered because of corruption, mismanagement, a few people’s greed…
Are you yawning already? That’s what I meant. Unless you have just come from Mars, you know it all. In fact, you hear it every time you switch on the television or read it when you open a newspaper. This book suffers from a problem that would otherwise seem inconceivable: Too much topicality, too much currency.
It does not help that the authors stopped about a 100 days before the kick-off of the Games. As explained in the epilogue, the original schedule required the writers to stop in January this year, so the book could be out by March. Seeing that events continued to unfold, they carried on for another few months, but only in the postscript. They did not change anything in the rest of the book. They should have. As you know, much water has flown down the Yamuna in the last 100 days, some of it even getting into the Games village. Snakes, too!
This book refreshes memories of my attempts at writing feature stories before the Internet made the world available to us at a few clicks. In those days, our library was full of clippings. The primary job of the library staff was to cut newspapers and file the clippings into hard-backed holders, which had thin metal rods running through them, and align them according to topics. These files were stacked floor to ceiling, wall to wall. One had to sit with some of those files and rummage through. It could easily take a couple of days, maybe more, just to cull out the relevant published matter on a subject.
Reading this book is like going through all the hard-backed files on the coverage of the Games. True, the clippings are exhaustive and span a long period of time. They have been collated from writings and statements and papers across the world. The authors had access to excellent archives, including, as the cover says, primary documents from the first British Empire Games in 1930. (That was the name for these Games till 1950. From 1954 to 1966 they were called the British Empire and Commonwealth Games.)
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Reading the book tends to leave the reader with the same weariness that came after rummaging through files and files of newspaper clippings. That is not entirely the authors’ fault. The history of the Games, purportedly the third-largest sporting event in the world after the soccer World Cup and the Olympics, does not have the drama to sustain interest. Partly, though, we can blame the writers’ breathlessness. While they have done an admirable job of compiling facts and various things written and said about the Games, they should have allowed themselves more room to be reflective. That is what marks a book apart from reportage.
The result is that at the end of the clippings, you are still waiting for a feature story to emerge, one that will fill your senses deliciously with perspective and insight. The book raises some pertinent questions, but stays shy of giving answers. To touch upon just one subject, there is a whole chapter on the role of sport and the Games in the boycott of South Africa in the apartheid era. The authors race through it. They tell us that white solidarity was the reason why New Zealand stood for so long with South Africa. Was it, really? Why did it not move the other white nations to support South Africa? Things must be more complicated than that.
SELLOTAPE LEGACY
Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta
HarperCollins
Rs 450