Awards and rewards

摘要

Sometimes the past suddenly intrudes upon us. So it was, when the controversy over the Arjuna award to Milkha Singh reminded me of another day and another age. The late 1950s and the first couple of years of the decade of the sixties were a time of hope and optimism. Independent India was still young and as a boy I was thrilled to hear of Milkha Singh's glorious quarter mile run across Rome's Olympic Stadium in 1960. It was a time of the radio and the newsreel that preceded a film in the cinema theatres. It was a time when we still thought of the hockey gold in the Olympics and Ramanathan Krishnan could even finesse his way into a Wimbledon singles semi-final. Cricket was not the all-consuming force that it is today. Gavaskar and Kapil Der were still to appear on the horizon; Tendulkar was not born. It was a time when a new world order appeared possible; John Kennedy's assumption of the US presidency promised a future that was to turn into a mirage. The disastrous border war with China lay ahead and the demoralizing food shortages of the mid-1960s were yet to be anticipated. The green revolution and Mrs Gandhi had not yet entered our lives. It was in this ambience that Milkha Singh raised the bar of sporting achievement by sprinting to within a tenth of a second of an Olympic medal, breaking the existing record in the course of his spectacular run. Why did such a man not receive this country's highest national award for achievement in sport, even when it was first instituted? Why did the committees in the Sports Ministry suddenly rediscover Milkha Singh? In the long years since the Rome Olympics there have been many sportsmen and women honoured for far lesser achievements. Milkha Singh's instinctive reaction of rejecting the award, highlighted the infirmities of the entire selection process, sparking a debate on the mechanisms by which we acknowledge men and women of distinction in sport. Are awards important? Undoubtedly they are; particularly in a directly competitive sphere of activity like sport. Was Milkha Singh a stray omission? Obviously not, since there have been many plaintive cries in the past few weeks from once famous names.