Memories, and chance to make many more

Rohit Mahajan

ANOTHER year of loss goes, but yet another year of loss looms: 406 persons lost their lives in India in the last 24 hours of 2021 — and we’re not even in the midst of a massive surge. Clearly, more grief will come our way.

2021 was a forgettable year. It was an unforgettable year. The desire to forget grapples with memory, and burnt into collective memory are tears of people lining up all night for an oxygen cylinder for a loved one, bloated bodies thrown up by the Ganga, queues in front of crematoriums, dozens of pyres sending up flames and smoke, almost en masse.

Sport, perhaps the most irrelevant of all modern multi-billion dollar enterprises, with little inherent value, has great benefits — it boosts the immunity of those who play and it elevates the mood of those who watch. Scientists suggest that the brain’s memory is almost limitless in theory — around a quadrillion bytes, enough to take in all information contained on the entire Internet. But for practical purposes, only certain images in the mind’s eye are uppermost, stirring emotion, pleasant or unpleasant — sport can edge out some of the unpleasant memories.

Washington Sundar hooking a ball, aimed at his eyes, for a six at the Gabba ground in Brisbane is one of the most amazing memories of 2021. Washington — whose father, Sundar, whispered the name of a Hindu God, Srinivasan, in his ear at his birth, but gave him a Christian name after a kindly neighbour in Triplicane — swatted off the world’s best bowler, Pat Cummins, as if he were a nobody. The Indian cricket team, whose bowlers had a combined 13 wickets going into the Brisbane Test, had the weakest attack Australia had faced in 140 years. But they turned the series on its head. The audacity of Washington took the breath away and left a lasting impression.

India won seven medals at the Olympics, including a gold in the main Olympic stadium, where track and field events take place. It was a feat that we did not even dare to dream of. Our sportspersons have become world-class in events which have weight categories to make an allowance for smaller individuals — boxing, wrestling and weightlifting, for instance — or those that don’t require the highest degree of athleticism, like shooting or archery. Neeraj Chopra’s gold — India’s first track and field medal in the Olympics — is groundbreaking because javelin throw requires strength, agility, technique of the highest order. PV Sindhu’s second consecutive medal is similarly remarkable. And the memory of P Sreejesh sitting atop the goal after the hockey team won a bronze, ending a wait of four decades? Priceless!

An unforgettable memory of the most forgettable kind has Sushil Kumar peering at the camera through a yellow towel that hid his face, escorted by men of Delhi Police’s Special Cell. Perhaps the greatest living Indian sportsperson — with two medals in consecutive Olympic Games, a feat later equalled by Sindhu in August — has touched the nadir by allegedly killing a young man in his akhara in Delhi.

The reset this year

This is the year of the Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games — combined, these two mega-events will provide to Indians world-class competition in wrestling, boxing, archery, shooting, cycling, hockey, athletics, to name a few. Four years ago, Neeraj Chopra won gold at CWG and Asian Games, and this year he should do a repeat — despite the distractions that a grateful country threw at him, due to which he lost practice time but gained 12-kg weight!

The new normal at sports venues, bereft of claps and laughter, is horrible, as we saw at the Olympics: What is sport without fans? It was a fate reserved in India for Test cricket in cities such as Nagpur and Mohali, where schoolkids would be bussed in to populate the stands, so that the players could wave at someone after performing a spectacular feat.

The desolate stadiums, sans fans, are terrible, and sport on TV is but a pale shadow of seeing it in person, but it’s a mercy that sport continues, new memories continue to be forged, giving us solace in terrible times.

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