Delhi’s Commonwealth Games debacle

I was never into sports when I was a kid. My older siblings were athletic and sporty, but much as I wanted to emulate them, I could not quite keep up. My sister played field hockey at the national level, but after my first experience of the thwack of a hockey stick on my unprotected shins, I trembled with fear at the thought of joining her and her teammates at their practice sessions. I loved watching cricket (who didn’t?), but the sight of that hard leather ball hurtling towards me scared the daylights out of me, so I wasn’t much of a batsman. My bowling sucked–I think I was the only aspiring spinner capable of bowling wide!

Nevertheless, I’d always loved following sports until I came to the U.S., and had to reconcile myself to a life without cricket coverage. (A sad, sad, life, I tell you.) Nearly two decades after I arrived in the land of the NFL and NBA, I am still relatively clueless about American sports, I must admit. Yes, I do try to keep up with who won the World Series (that’s baseball, right?) and whatnot, but that’s about it.

But ask me about my favorite teams and players, or what I think about Barry Bonds and the whole steroids issue, or which pro-football owner funds right-wing Republicans, or which basketball players are also politically left-leaning, and, lo and behold, I’ll likely be able to say something halfway intelligent.

I owe this smattering of familiarity with American sports to one Dave Zirin, sports columnist for The Nation and several other print and online publications, regular commentator on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and Morning Joe (go figure!) whose inimitable knack for blending sports, politics, and hilarity knows no bounds. The guy is being hailed as one of the most exciting sports commentators around, and rightly so, methinks (although I can’t name another!). Read Zirin once, or listen to his XM radio show, and regardless of whether you are an American sports fanatic or a dabbler like me, you will be hooked. Necessarily, most of Zirin’s writing focuses on the American scene, but he has, over the last couple of years, been covering more and more international sporting events.

(Image: Wikipedia)

Zirin’s latest piece in The Nation expertly dissects the politics of the Commonwealth Games, which are slated to begin in Delhi in less than two weeks’ time. The preparations for the games have been, not to put too fine a point on it, an unmitigated disaster. But the Urban Development Minister, S. Jaipal Reddy told reporters, in that cavalier way that Indian politicians do when they respond to crises beyond their ability to manage: ”I am as confident and as cool as ever about our organizing. These are all minor hiccups.”

As Zirin points out, the $6 billion Games “might not go on”:

I don’t know if the CWG [Commonwealth Games] has created goodwill, but as the 2010 Games are set to start in Delhi, we are getting a very good understanding of empire, at least the 21st century variant. The games are teetering on an unprecedented implosion and the problem is not just that India, a country where 46% of the children are underweight, is spending $2.5 billion on athletic facilities alone. The problem is not just that India, a country where 42% of the people live under the World Bank poverty line of $1.25 a day, promised $100,000 to every country’s delegation to secure the games (what is called in less refined circles “a bribe.”) And the problem is not just that this state of affairs raises the question about whether India, with all its nouveau economic might, should be playing footstool for the inert Queen’s “Empire Games.”

The games might not go on because the CWG facilities built at great economic and social cost have been flagged as a serious health hazard. In preparing the various arenas, dozens of workers have been grievously injured in accidents due to faulty materials and equipment. This week alone a ceiling collapsed at the weightlifting venue and a bridge crumbled outside the main staging ground, Nehru Stadium, injuring 27.

Read the rest of Zirin’s piece in The Nation, and if you like what you read, check out his weekly column, Edge of Sports, and his XM radio show, Edge of Sports Radio (which is available as a podcast on iTunes–don’t you love technology?!).

Related Articles

• Commonwealth Games head sees improvement in conditions (independent.co.uk)
• To go or not to Delhi 2010 should be up to individuals (thepunch.com.au)
• Commonwealth Games ‘should not have gone to India’ (channel4.com)
• Bridge collapse adds to India’s Commonwealth Games woe

The sheer brutality of colonialism

In my seminar on Politics and Literature of Postcolonial Africa, we have been discussing Aime Cesaire’s classic Discourse on Colonialism. For Cesaire (and several other radical Black intellectuals like W. E. B. DuBois), the emergence of fascism in Europe was not an anomaly, not an exceptional moment in European history.

Popular discussions, withing academia and without, encourage us to view the mass slaughter of millions of Jews under Nazi rule as an abnormality, an inexplicable deviation, in the onward march of European cultures and societies towards Progress, Reason and Enlightenment. So students are taught, very early on, to refer to “the Holocaust” in the singular, capitalizing the word to render it as a proper noun.

Cesaire argues, instead, that to view the emergence of Nazism in this light is to erase from historical memory the sheer brutality of colonial wars of conquest that have been the defining feature of European history in the modern era. In a brilliant passage (a favorite of mine), he demolishes the notion that European Nazism was an anomaly or deviation, and insists that we recognize the continuity, in cultural if not in political and economic terms, between European colonialism abroad and the Nazi atrocities at home.

I’ve been waiting a long time to quote this passage in full somewhere, and here’s my opportunity, finally. Cesaire writes:

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a centre of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated”, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but sulrey, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind – it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack.

The relevance of Cesaire today is not hard to understand. Think Abu Ghraib. Think Guantanamo. Think of the U.S. soldiers who have recently been accused of killing Afghan civilians “for sport.” Think of the manner in which a viciously racist campaign against Muslims and against Islam has led, in recent months, to mosques being vandalized and attacked, Muslims being physically assaulted, and Muslims as a group being blamed for the bombing of the World Trade Center.

In my seminar discussions, I often find that my students can accept all of this as true, as real, and applaud Cesaire’s polemical indictment of European imperialist culture, but balk at the political conclusions that this critique leads to. In particular, while they might learn to love Cesaire, they find the writings of Cesaire’s most famous student, Frantz Fanon, difficult to swallow, especially when they find him condoning, and indeed glorifying, violent, armed resistance to colonial rule.

One has to be reminded, time and again, of the utter savagery of imperialist domination and conquest. Absent this, it becomes difficult to comprehend the violence that resistance movements typically employ.

In this context, check out the latest blog post from ScarletGuju, a close friend and comrade of mine who is currently researching the Indian struggle for independence from British colonialism. If you ever had any doubts about the brutality of colonialism, take a look at this post, and the picture that accompanies it.

And then ask yourself what would you do if an occupying power brutalized your families, your friends, your neighbors in this manner, all for the crime of demanding the very liberty and progress that the occupiers held up as their “ideals.”

Related Articles

• Colonialism and the ‘scramble for Africa’ (cnn.com)

Twenty20, corporate leagues and Indian cricket

It worries me that cricket too is morphing into a clone of American sports culture.

Check out this article from the New York Times: it talks about American cheerleaders coming to Bangalore to hold a national cheerleader training of sorts! Don’t we have enough sexism at home? Do we have to import some more?

The problem is not in terms of the pseudo-”swadeshi” argument of the Hindutva folks and their Vanar Sena apes, but in terms of the sheer economics of it. The commercialization of American sport has had many negative effects:

1. Lured by the huge amount of money in coporate sponsorship that the leagues generate, city governments and town municipalities go out of their way to bring the leagues to their cities and towns. Huge stadiums are built at the expense of taxpayer-funded subsidies. Check out this article from the Wall Street Journal (certainly not a radical socialist newspaper!!) for more on why, and with what consequences. It tells us that, according to an article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives,

Arenas put a drag on the local economy by hurting spending on other activities in the city and boosting municipal costs such as security.

Beyond what the WSJ article lays out, we can also say this: Prime seats in the stadiums are auctioned off to corporate bidders, where corporate CEOs hang out with their politician buddies. Meanwhile, the regular fan, the working-class fan of the game find the tickets priced beyond their reach, because there are fewer seats up for sale. Plus, they now pay $8-$10 for a hot dog that otherwise would cost a dollar, and $8 for a beer that otherwise would cost $4. Taxpayers are promised big returns in terms of jobs; but these jobs tend to be the lowest-paid and temporary service jobs. Meanwhile, money that could have gone for better schools, cheaper healthcare, cheaper utilities, etc., goes to the builders and developers who make big bucks in the process (no offense to builders and developers on this list!!).

2. The game itself becomes a huge advertising billboard for multinationals to sell their wares to the Indian consumer middle class. Reliance, Toyota, Infosys, make the big bucks, while we suffer through a constant barrage of advertising that makes the game into a spectacle. Where there once was a “gentleman’s” spirit behind it, the game now is transformed into what makes for the best advertisement, the best commercial for all the commodities they want us to buy. It becomes a garish, commercialised spectacle, which takes over the spirit of the game. Ruthless competition, celebrity stardom, and an emphasis on charisma rather than talent begins to ruin what used to be a showcase for talent.

(Meanwhile, we become very good consumers. While we shop in our glittering new malls and drink fizzy sugar syrup [yes, Coke] thinking it’s cool, our credit card debts go up along with our diabetes stats. )

3. The sportsmen (and women, although less so) become commodities themselves, bought and sold to the highest bidder. Nothing wrong with that, perhaps, but it has a trickle-down effect on the millions of youth who struggle to make it into the big leagues. The vast majority of them will have their hopes dashed, or dreams deferred, because only the cream of the crop will get the big bucks. The vast majority will make do with crappy, low-wage jobs, playing in some local league which struggles to even stay afloat. They won’t get lucrative contracts or endorsement deals. The result of this is still more ruthless competition, reaching down to the very lowest levels of the game’s foodchain.

Enter steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. You get the drift.

There’s a whole lot more to this, as it affects the local economy, the culture of the sport, and the popular culture as a whole, but I have neither the time nor that kind of knowledge of the business of sports to explain it here. In the Indian context, it becomes even messier, I would argue. The super-wealthy in India are already making fabulous amounts of wealth. Do they need to invade our sports as well?

Why don’t the rich and the multinationals put some money into improving the infrastructure in cities like Bangalore? Or in ridding the countryside of poverty, hunger and disease? The Tatas, the Ambanis, the Hindujas, and their ilk could wipe out rural poverty without even noticing a change in their own lifestyles. If you don’t believe me, go do the research. Find out how much the World Bank or the UNDP says is needed to eliminate rural poverty, illiteracy, healthcare, etc in India–you will be surprised at how little it would cost to do all of this. On a global scale the estimation is something of the order of $40 billion. That’s all.

Why don’t they put this money into high-quality free education for everyone through college? They could afford it. The government could subsidize it using taxpayer money. What’s that you say? Revenues are low? Well, how about raising the tax on capital gains?

Of course, the rich won’t like that, but the rest of India will. And it is the rest of India that the commercial world wants us to forget.

Hell, what do I know? I could be totally wrong on all of this. But check out Dave Zirin’s book Welcome to the Terrordome and his sports column, Edge of Sports. You’ll learn a thing or two about the business of American sports.

Believe me, it ain’t pretty.

So pardon me if I’m less than enthusiastic about this American-ization of cricket.