Run & dance your way to health

“Kya Bholey?
Bhej dey soney or
chandi key goley —
Khush rahey guru
or cheyley!”
From Charasnama
by Bachchoo

The Paralympics have followed the Olympics and are bringing incredible feats to Channel 4’s screens every day. The side industry to the grand international summer display, which has overtaken London and indeed the whole of Britain, is the political enthusiasm for sport and the scramble of politicians and worthies to endorse the physical health of the nation. This takes the form not of banning the purveyors of fatty foods or putting extra taxes on hamburgers and chips, but on a feigned concern for the next generation’s sporting health.
Politicians are riding the wave of Olympic popularity, so much so that Jeremy Hunt, the British secretary for sport, media and culture has been immediately promoted in a ministerial shuffle to the very heavyweight and responsible post of secretary for health. It is as though a minister for broadcasting in India was suddenly elevated to the post of Prime Minister. Unthinkable!
In Britain the debate rages about the role of sports in the curriculum of schools. British Prime Minister David Cameron and Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, have both made pious statements about the two hours of sport they thoroughly enjoyed during their time at Eton. Their remarks seemed to amount to a demand that all schools should set this as a target.
Mr Cameron went on to say that there was an allocation for compulsory physical education and sport but that some schools were passing off activities such as “Indian dancing” as contributory to this quota. He seemed to disapprove.
I don’t suppose that Mr Cameron spends much time watching the likes of Shah Rukh Khan or any of our glamorous actors of both sexes shaking and wobbling their every muscle in the vigorously choreographed and exhausting “item numbers” of contemporary popular Indian cinema and stage. A respectable BBC programme, in a light-hearted but targeted report of Mr Cameron’s remarks made the point, presenting viewers with a troupe performing the most strenuous “Bollywood” routine. Seeing that, one would rather run the marathon. The score? Indian dance and the BBC — 1: David Cameron — 0 and a minus point for being a bit out of touch with multicultural UK.
The other debate on this theme that followed the Olympics was a political dispute over the selling off of sports facilities of schools under the present coalition government and its Tory education secretary Michael Gove.
Mr Gove has, it seems, allowed or encouraged individual schools to sell off their land assets and put the money to alternative use. His defenders argue that schools don’t need to own sports facilities, they simply need to have access to them. It reminds me of a quote from the late businessman and fraudster Robert Maxwell who said, “the really rich don’t have money, they have access to money.”
I hate to agree with fraudsters (or any complacent capitalists for that matter) but my own schooldays in Pune confirm this approach to playing fields — if not to money and richness.
My school in those decades made sport compulsory. We had terms of football, hockey, athletics and seasonal cricket. The hockey and football were played on pitches in the centre of Poona (as it then was) Racecourse. The boarders at the school were marched off from the school gates down one hill and up the other to the plateau where the white staked fences of the racecourse formed an uneven oval.
The players would cross the different racing tracks paved with bark, grass and sand to the enclosed central space and then break into teams. Those of us who were day-scholars and lived at home had to dash off after school, get our “gear” and return at the appropriate time, mostly by bicycle to this racecourse arena.
In the athletics term, our sports training consisted of running around the periphery of this area, probably a good mile and a half distance, a few times in a pseudo-military squad formation with our PE (physical education) teacher riding a bicycle behind us.
The teacher was a Mr Thomas Sewell, a strict but compassionate Welshman who had been an NCO (non-commissioned officer) in the Army of the Raj and had stayed in India after Partition. He was the principal games teacher and when he pursued us on bicycle he carried with him a length of banyan-tree root. He used this flex as a whip to encourage those laggards who fell back to make a greater effort. I carry the marks on my back to this day! (Surely that’s a lie! — Ed. Okay yaar, just a bit of currying sympathy — fd)
Sports were the respected dimension of excellence in our school. A 100 per cent score in a trigonometry exam or a perfect performance of a violin sonata was considered nothing compared to being the hockey team’s vice-captain. The Captains and the Kings of our school were the boxers and cross-country runners, the young men who were almost always totally indifferent to the achievements or exercise of the intellect or the acquisition of such skills as would contribute to the construction of rockets.
It inspired some in the school, and I have to count myself amongst them, to make a contrary assessment of the real world and come to the conclusion that there was something inherently distorted in the school’s value systems. After all Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein or William Shakespeare had probably never been hockey captain of their schools or knocked someone senseless in the boxing ring. Yes, one had to admire Milkha Singh, the Indian Olympian, but even he suffered the derogatory joke: When asked whether he was relaxing he answered, “No, I am Milkha Singh.” For me, it was not an anti-Sikh joke, but one that placed athletic achievement in the larger framework of human achievement.
Of course, had I known then how much Manchester United footballers or Indian Premier League cricketers earn a week, I may have changed my mind, run faster and not been scarred by banyan roots.