No team spirit

The recent successes notched up by Sania Mirza in tennis and Narain Kartikeyan in car racing raise the old question once again: are Indians better at individual sports than they are in team ones? And if so why? Whichever sport one looks at, it seems clear that Indians perform better as individuals than in teams.

India has produced world-class players in chess, badminton, shooting, tennis, and even golf, but languishes in football, volleyball, basketball, and even field hockey.

Cricket is played by too few countries to be ranked on a global scale, though even here the argument would be that the individual stars are so much better than the team as a whole.

Indeed, some would argue that the "individual and not team" argument is generally true in many fields, not just of sports. In music India does not have a tradition of harmony in the western sense, and therefore of large (or even small) orchestras. But its soloists, whether in vocal or instrumental music, are legendary.

In the sciences, Indians have excelled in personalised achievements but Indian labs have yet to produce anything truly worthwhile. In government, individual ministers and civil servants shine but as a system it is a shambles.

The examples can be drawn from practically any field of activity and the same peculiarity stands out.

In sports, at least, the explanation appears straightforward enough""individual sports are essentially incentivised by a two-way contract between the sportsperson and the sponsor, whereas team sports are run by federations, boards, and what have you.

The growing strength of the Indian marketplace and the money that advertising and sponsorship contracts offer, are now enough to make individual sport an option for youngsters whose middle-class parents in the ordinary course would insist that they study for a medical degree instead.

In contrast, the sports federations mess things up because not only are they unable to come up with positive incentives, they actually put negative ones in place. Why, the rifle shooters, it was reported some time ago, could not be provided with enough ammunition for practising shooting.

The sinful tales of the athletics and hockey federations are too well known to be repeated.

This is not to argue that such organisations are bad ab initio. After all, they run well enough in other countries (though not in South Asia). But the manner in which they are run is certainly open to question.

The simplest question to which no one has a satisfactory answer is: why do politicians and retired government officials always head or man these bodies? It is no use replying that sportsmen are bad managers.

That may be true, but the answer lies in getting good managers, not politicians and retired policemen, whose idea of management is very different because they have such different objectives.

The Indian imitation of first the Nazi and then the Communist model of using sports to prove the superiority of the political system has failed because we were never focused on the objective.