Upside-down Commonwealth games

Swimming on the athletics track, water polo in the gymnasium, orgies on the hockey astroturf! It is perfectly understandable if these are some of the nightmares suffered by not just the Commonwealth Games organisers but by the Delhi chief minister and Union minister for sports and youth affairs (pun unintended). When not telecasting images of leaking roofs, mountains of debris and stadia half-built and still-incomplete with just 67 days to go for the inauguration of the Commonwealth Games, the media has been highlighting allegations of sexual harassment of India’s women hockey players by the male coach.

So much so that Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit’s standard response to media queries these days is ‘Please leave us alone’. The only reassurance is from the games organising committee chairman Suresh Kalmadi who maintains that everything is hunky-dory and from the country’s urban development minister Jaipal Reddy who tells us that Indians excel at leaving things till the last minute and then doing a good job. It is an optimism that is, alas, not shared by Delhi chief minister, going by reports that she has threatened to blacklist contractors who do not complete their work on time or do a shoddy job.

New Delhi overlays seven cities that have come up in the past. So is it time to seek some inspiration from the mythological past? In the good old days of Indraprastha, builders of cities could rely on the divine architect Vishwakarma to design and complete palaces, stadia, etc a jiffy.

If nothing else, such an intervention could spare us both the televised wailing of those Cassandras who tell us now that India should never have bid for the Commonwealth Games or the never-say-die optimism of those Caesars who maintain that mega sporting events are just what the masses want, in a debate that resonates from the days of gladiator-sports in the Colosseum of ancient Rome!