#
If you're an Indian of a certain age, you might have heard the question, where were
#
you when India won the 1983 World Cup?
#
If you're somewhat younger, the question could be, where were you when Dravid and Laxman
#
had that partnership, or when Abhinav Bindra won gold at the Olympics, or Vishayanand became
#
world champion or Dhoni hit that six?
#
Someday they will surely ask, where were you when Neeraj Chopra threw that javelin?
#
Why is sport such a big deal for so many of us?
#
That moments that don't even feature us, that we had nothing to do with personally,
#
become such a big part of our lives?
#
Part of the answer isn't pleasant.
#
Sport can be used to whip up ugly nationalistic sentiment akin to war minus a shooting, in
#
George Orwell's famous words, it's a zero-sum game, someone has to lose for someone else
#
And indeed, some sports like boxing are like ugly artifacts from a more brutal age.
#
But having said this, sport can also elevate us.
#
It can reveal the best of human character, and watching another human being transcend
#
their limitations can inspire us to dream.
#
Indeed, one thing I love about the Olympics is the range of human stories that we are
#
exposed to, so many different people beating the odds and rising above their circumstances.
#
And sometimes those circumstances can be so harsh that just being there is a crazy achievement.
#
Even though I'm middle-aged now and should be jaded and cynical, I can't fail to be
#
both inspired and humbled by what these sportspeople achieve.
#
And that's especially so if they're from India.
#
The obstacles for a sportsperson here are insane, almost insurmountable.
#
Over the decades, Indian sport outside of cricket has been held back by poverty, bad
#
governance, poor infrastructure, and an inferiority complex.
#
Time and again, we have told ourselves, this is beyond us.
#
We are not a sporting nation.
#
We can't dream these dreams.
#
Well, the times have changed.
#
Indian sport has turned a corner.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, my last episode was about the 1991 reforms and how
#
they changed the way we look at ourselves in the decades since India opened itself up
#
to the world and gained a new self-confidence.
#
More and more people became participants in our progress.
#
And what happened to Indian society and India's economy was mirrored in sport.
#
Now, sadly, in both social and economic terms, we seem to have slipped backwards.
#
Things don't look good.
#
But as far as sport is concerned, we are marching on.
#
As the euphoria of the Tokyo Olympics settles down, why don't we take stock of Indian sport?
#
My guests today are Joy Bhattacharya and Nandan Kamath.
#
Joy has been on the show before in a fabulous episode I'll link from the show notes called
#
Building Sports Ecosystems.
#
He spent the first hour of that episode talking about his experience of building the Kolkata
#
But it was the second hour that I found both moving and inspiring.
#
In that, he gave us a close up look of his journey bringing the under 17 football World
#
Cup to India and trying to build a football ecosystem across the country.
#
He then moved on to volleyball and formed a volleyball league that faced many obstacles,
#
but is due to return soon.
#
And as you will learn from this episode, he also taught the Indian contingent at Tokyo
#
My second guest today is also a remarkable figure.
#
Nandan Kamath loved sports so much as a kid that he would go to bed with a cricket bat
#
He played cricket for India at the under 16 level and captained the Karnataka team.
#
He then chose law as a profession, became a lawyer, went to Oxford as a road scholar,
#
went to Harvard Law School, worked in a top law firm there for three years, and then gave
#
it up and came back to India because in his heart, he was still that little boy sleeping
#
In 2008, he started the Go Sports Foundation, whose aim was to help Indian sports people
#
who would otherwise fall through the cracks.
#
Over the years, Nandan and his team have helped countless Indian sports people in so many
#
His insights on Indian sport are second to none.
#
The show notes to this episode contain links to articles by him, as well as to a fantastic
#
book on Indian sport, co-edited by him.
#
And now before we get to the conversation with Nandan and Joy, let's take a quick commercial
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
#
In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog, India Uncut,
#
which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time.
#
I loved the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
#
I exercised my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things
#
because I wrote about many different things.
#
Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it.
#
Only now I am doing it through a newsletter.
#
I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I will write
#
regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
#
I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
#
So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe.
#
Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.
#
You don't need to go anywhere.
#
So subscribe now for free.
#
The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
#
Joy and Nandan, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
Hi, terrific to be here.
#
Absolutely terrific to be back and to be one of the people who's been called back is a
#
Thank you so much, Amit.
#
I'm a debutant here and it's a little bit weird because I've heard you for maybe two
#
or three hundred hours and now I have a chance to speak.
#
I think it's the heard and the unheard.
#
So I'm the unheard for the show.
#
No, no, I mean, it's entirely my honor.
#
And since you've heard so much of the show, I should apologize to you for speaking at
#
normal speed because I think most people who listen, listen at higher speeds and they find
#
it really weird when they meet me in person, like, why are you talking so slowly?
#
The reason I say it's an honor for me is because, you know, people like me, we sit around pontificating
#
about things, having conversations, having discussions.
#
And one reason I admire Joy and one reason I was keen to have you on the show as soon
#
as I read up on all the things that you've done is that you guys are actually out there
#
making a difference in the real world, not just sitting back and complaining, kyaar sport
#
mein ye haal hai and look at that federation and this and that.
#
But you're actually out there kind of making a difference, which is why Joy, before you
#
joined the call, I congratulated Nandan on the Tokyo result and he would of course very
#
modestly say that maine kuch nahi kiya, ye sab athletes hai.
#
But you know, you guys are also heroes of people who love Indian sport in a way.
#
But I won't embarrass you further.
#
You know, before we get down to talking about the state of Indian sport and so on, I'd love
#
to know a little bit about your personal journeys.
#
Joy, of course, in the fantastic episode we did earlier, which I linked from the show
#
notes to the listeners, you already took us through a bit of it, but I'll ask you more.
#
Let's start with you, Nandan.
#
It's not that you are a lawyer who's gotten into supporting sports and all of that right
#
You've been a sports person yourself.
#
You've represented in India, I believe, right?
#
So tell me a little bit about your sporting journey and where it begins.
#
And I read somewhere that you speaking very sort of passionately about how you love sports
#
so much that when you were a kid at night, you would sleep with a cricket bat in your
#
bed, which is tell me a bit about those years.
#
Yeah, so like you put it, Amit, I wasn't a lawyer who went to sport, but a sports person
#
who ended up in the law.
#
And that is the story really, sleeping with a cricket battered.
#
I think that says it all.
#
In my bedroom, I had this huge poster of Kapil Dev.
#
My sister had a huge poster of Madonna, and that perhaps speaks enough of both of us.
#
But really, as a kid, just absolutely in love with sport, I had whole World Cups played
#
by myself against the wall, all Wimbledon's just so obsessed with the sporting journey
#
and the sporting quest had lots of heroes.
#
Early memories are watching the Olympics, Greg Luganis, Bo Vilander, Ben Johnson may
#
not be the greatest ambassador, but all of those are just so imprinted in my mind, but
#
also people like Stefan Edberg.
#
It was really sport was this window out into the world for me.
#
New accents, understanding people, seeing, I mean, hearing Australian commentators in
#
And the earliest memory of all I do have is the 1983 World Cup.
#
And it's a little bit sort of overdone.
#
But I just remember obsessively going through, they had this official guide to the Prudential
#
I must have read that book, like literally 200 times or 300 times.
#
I knew every scorecard and you Dave Houghton and Tricorce.
#
And I mean, literally every player that played for every one of those teams.
#
And it was that obsession which really never left in some sense.
#
It translated into playing sport at the school level.
#
So I do share something with Abhinav Bindra and Neeraj Chopra.
#
My mum put me into sport because I was a little bit unfit, a little bit pudgy and wanted me
#
to stay out of trouble.
#
But that's where the comparison ends.
#
So she put me into school, took me to the PT instructor and said, let him play hockey.
#
So hockey was my first sport, loved it, fantastic team sport.
#
But as I went along, cricket became the one that I was a little bit better at.
#
I had good hand-eye coordination, something I played in the streets, but was able to translate
#
into competitive cricket.
#
I took that person quite seriously, ended up captaining the Karnataka State cricket
#
team at the under 16 level.
#
When I was 15, I got into the under 21 team.
#
So I mean, there was that potential, but that potential ended pretty abruptly when I went
#
to the National Law School entrance exam and I got in.
#
And it became that point of making a decision, are you going to try and pursue this cricket
#
or are you going to become a lawyer?
#
And that was something very directly confronted with at my National Law School interview,
#
where Dr. Madhavan, the founder of the law school, sits you down for an interview.
#
And he just said, young man, are you going to be a cricketer or are you going to be a
#
And I hadn't really thought of it in that sense.
#
Is it this such a significant binary choice that a 17-year-old person needs to make?
#
I mean, that's a life choice.
#
And I was very fortunate, I had very, very open-minded parents.
#
My father was a chartered accountant.
#
My mother was a political cartoonist, still, I think India's only political cartoonist,
#
passed away about 20 years ago.
#
So I had a very open household.
#
We had lots of cousins and uncles in the IITs and very academic.
#
But they said, you make the choice.
#
You want to continue playing cricket?
#
You want to be a lawyer?
#
And I chose that latter choice and at that point, it didn't seem like a very difficult
#
There were maybe six, seven people making good careers out of cricket.
#
There were probably thousands of lawyers making reasonable careers.
#
So I chose what you would call the conservative choice.
#
And looking back, I feel like that defined me, defined not just the pursuit of doing
#
well at the law, I'd given up something I really cared about and I was possibly good
#
And that drove me really hard to do well at my academics.
#
You give up something you loved, make the other thing count now.
#
But also when I look back on that moment, it may be romanticizing the moment, but it
#
also might be looking back and finding explanations.
#
But that choice for a young person to make, it really stuck with me and still does.
#
That someone needs to make that choice between pursuing an education and pursuing sport.
#
And in many ways, that has defined my journey and the things I've chosen to do, the things
#
That's really snapshot early years.
#
I mean, people talk about non-vegetarians, I'm willing to eat anything that moves.
#
For me, anything that was sport, I loved and I was willing to jump in, get involved, participate.
#
It was just a love affair with sport.
#
It was me and it still is in some sense.
#
Yeah, that's very resonant.
#
And of course, it sort of dates you in a certain generation of people, 1983 World Cup, the
#
I remember when I was growing up, I had this thick wisdom book of scorecards, which was
#
published in 1979 and basically had the scorecard of every test match played until then.
#
And I knew all of them by heart pretty much and that there weren't that many test matches
#
played until then, of course, at that point.
#
So one would go through all those scorecards and make up narratives in your head about
#
what happened along with all the other supplementary reading you're doing.
#
And there was such a paucity of that information and so on as well.
#
You had one channel, Doordarshan, you didn't really get to see much sports in it.
#
You didn't get too much exposure in that sense.
#
And your choice is particularly heartbreaking because at one level, these are choices that
#
everybody makes that at some point, you know, there is the road taken and there is a road
#
And at that point in time, we might think it's a trivial choice.
#
It's not such a big deal.
#
But essentially, you know, one life you could have lived, it's just over at that point.
#
And another one begins.
#
But it's especially heartbreaking in the sporting context, because the fact that even if you're
#
an incredibly talented cricketer, the rational choice would still have been go for law.
#
Because like you said, survivor bias, just a handful of people at the top make money.
#
The rest of the people don't really make anything.
#
Joy, tell me a little bit about your journey, because to the best of my knowledge, you haven't
#
really played for India or captain of the straight team so far.
#
But you've been deeply involved with sports, you know, right from 96, if I remember correctly
#
from our last conversation.
#
And obviously, you were a lover of sport before that as well.
#
So sort of take me through that.
#
And also, I wonder if you have any insights like I've been sort of thinking and memory
#
is a really strange thing, because you don't always remember what happened.
#
You remember what you remember, and it changes over time, right.
#
And sometimes I try and sit back and think about what it was to be an Indian sporting
#
fan at the time, that is there a sense of inferiority complex, for example, is there
#
an assumption that we can never be world class except perhaps in cricket, which like four
#
and a half countries play seriously or whatever.
#
So what are those sort of stages like and what is that point like, in a sense, you got
#
into you perhaps love sport all your life, but you get into active involvement with sport
#
at a time and satellite television comes, India opens up, you can watch sports channels,
#
you can watch every sport across the world.
#
How does that mindset begin to change over a period of time?
#
Well, lots of us look to start off, I played sport in college, I played basketball seriously
#
played for the university, my university was really no, no, it's okay, I was fairly decent
#
at it, but I mean, fairly decent at a university in Bengal, which is not exactly the hotbed
#
of basketball is, is absolutely fine.
#
But what I did get a great sense of is because I've done inter university tournaments, what
#
I did have a great sense of was, especially for a sport, which is not cricket, and of
#
course, in those days, in the college level, I don't think it makes that much of a difference.
#
The way sportsmen are treated, I mean, you go for a tournament, you literally sleep on
#
floors, you have, you go to the fields to bathroom, because the bathrooms are so dirty,
#
you can't go anywhere there.
#
So I've seen all of that, you know, and the two other things that I have seen, perhaps
#
being a bit older than you bloke says, you know, when Sunil Gavaskar was batting, and
#
you're listening to commentary, you know, whether it's 76 or 79.
#
So all Indian fans are, you know, today, they, they listen for wins, they listen that, okay,
#
you know, we're going to win this match, we're going to do this, Gavaskar is not batting
#
for wins, he was batting for our self respect.
#
You know, there's Gavaskar, there's Vishwanath, and there are a couple of players in between,
#
and there's nothing else.
#
So every time he goes out there and faces these desperately dangerous fast bowlers,
#
whether it's Bob Willis, or Dennis Daly, or Jeff Thompson, or Michael Holden, he's batting
#
for our self respect, you can go out and show your face there, because you know, Gavaskar
#
So literally, you get onto the bus to go to, you know, school or wherever.
#
And you're waiting, because when you're going to get off and go and ask that, you know,
#
Or you see, if you're coming back from school, is Gavaskar still batting?
#
So I was part of that one era where literally, a self respecting draw was so important to
#
Victories were very few and far between.
#
You know, everyone talks about 76th board of Spain, but you know, how many times did
#
They are very few and far between.
#
By and large, you're just saying, guys, just allow us to leave this match with our head
#
Or even if it's a defeat, let it not be a crushing defeat.
#
So I've seen a lot of that phase of Indian cricket, which perhaps you guys have seen post
#
You've seen far more success.
#
And really, our test sites were also better.
#
A couple of them, you know, 86, 87, England, 91, 92, we are actually competing in Australia
#
So those are very different sites from the sites that I saw between the 70s and mid 70s
#
And the other thing that I did see is the actual, you know, two, one sport rising and
#
the other in decline, which is cricket and hockey.
#
So in every middle class household in the big six cities, I don't know about the rest,
#
everyone had a hockey stick as well.
#
You would have a hockey stick at home.
#
You would go down and play hockey.
#
And in fact, most of the balls with which we played cricket most of the time were pocket
#
balls where a lot of hockey was played.
#
If you didn't play serious cricket, if you played at home, you played a lot with the
#
And those are the kind of things that are actually I remember actually, if you see a
#
Rishikesh Mukherjee film like Goal Mall, he's crazy about cricket.
#
He's crazy about hockey.
#
And then this slowly starts diverging at some point in time.
#
And I think that's the two journeys I saw.
#
I've seen Indian crickets journey to self-respect and winning.
#
And I've seen Indian cricket rise and Indian hockey fall.
#
You know, like you brought up the interesting point of self-respect, which is again resonant,
#
you know, Gavaskar is playing and today we look back and we say that, oh, you know, personal
#
records matter and Gavaskar would play for himself and all of that.
#
But the point is most of the time the team would lose, especially when they went abroad.
#
So he's just putting up the front that he can.
#
But my question about self-respect is this, this ties into a larger question that if we
#
kind of look at how the world has progressed in the last 20, 30 years, not just India,
#
but the world is that there is a fragmentation of everything.
#
For example, you look at the media in the 80s and 90s, you have these trusted mainstream
#
There is a consensus on truth and then it gets democratized and everything gets completely
#
fragmented and that's both good and bad.
#
It's good because now everyone has a means of production and some of the negative knock
#
on effects are that it becomes a war of narratives.
#
There's no consensus on truth anymore.
#
Similarly, what I see happening in entertainment and perhaps sport, which I would kind of say
#
is a twin of entertainment in a certain sense, is that, you know, there are more options.
#
Like if you were in the 70s, you would be watching hockey and cricket and maybe the balance
#
shifted at some point, but essentially that was it.
#
Today there's a lot else, you know, even something like chess is very popular on YouTube and
#
there are all these other kinds of sports which people follow.
#
You know, in the last 20 years, there's been this burgeoning of Indian fans suddenly finding
#
English football clubs to be loyal to, even though they've never been there.
#
Is that something that in a sense has changed the stakes?
#
Is that a reason why a modern Indian sporting fan may not understand, say, the visceral
#
impact that sport could have had on people like us?
#
And I'm, of course, at this moment speaking purely from a sort of a fanhood perspective.
#
So look, the two things, one is that one of the things that international sport did do
#
when you started coming, especially star sports and all these channels coming in, it showed
#
us something that we were not aware of and it was a rude awakening.
#
And I remember specifically in football, the rude awakening, like we've had Premier League
#
football and all going on since 93, 94.
#
But in 1996, ESPN star sports, in those days there was a separate ESPN channel and a separate
#
They got together around 97.
#
So ESPN in their great wisdom was showing Euro 96, which was fantastic.
#
And in the breaks between Euro 96, they have bought 10 years of rights to calculate a league
#
And it's a defining moment because what happened was there was a half an hour gap between matches.
#
They didn't have a studio.
#
So what they'd do is they'd show a Euro match and then in the half an hour before the next
#
Euro match, they'd show Calcutta football league highlights, East Bengal, Mohun Bagan,
#
and Mohunuddin Sporting.
#
And I remember my father was there with me because he was on his way and those days I
#
was working for IMDT deploy and he was on his way to visit my sister in the US.
#
So he used to watch these Euro matches and then he's suddenly seeing East Bengal, Mohun
#
And you know, suddenly that football is in such sharp contrast because you're seeing
#
And my father actually once really bewildered and he looked at me and said, are these guys
#
playing in slow motion?
#
Because suddenly he's seen what international football looks like.
#
So yes, 30% of it is better cameras, better vision, all that.
#
But 70% of it was that suddenly the game that he thought was perfectly normal to play in
#
East Bengal, Mohun Bagan match was shown in contrast to what international football really
#
And that's a realization that has happened in Indian sport.
#
And it's a very powerful realization because suddenly every football team in India today,
#
we are struggling again to get back because we are saying, OK, you know, our football
#
was 30% world standard.
#
Now we are at 55, 54, 55%.
#
But clearly you have a choice of watching an ISL team or you have a choice of watching
#
And that choice has made things much more difficult for Indian fans and much more difficult
#
for Indian sport to grow because you're suddenly up against, you know, channels know no loyalty,
#
you know, your remote button knows no loyalty.
#
So that is now a challenge that's facing every part of Indian sport.
#
And perhaps cricket is the best off in that nature because whatever it is, you know, the
#
IPL, the best cricket players in the world come and play in the IPL.
#
Every other product we have is an inferior product to something you will see abroad.
#
So OK, here's my next question.
#
I just did an episode on the importance of liberalisation, the 91 reforms.
#
And my guests were Shruti Rajgopalan and Ajay Shah.
#
And right at the end, I asked him that, you know, on what gave them hope and what gave
#
And Ajay gave me an interesting answer.
#
He said that what gives me hope is that the 91 reforms, even if you've gone backwards
#
and terrible things are happening now, even if all that has happened, the 91 reforms and
#
what happened in the subsequent 20 years till about 2011 showed us that Indians can achieve
#
We can compete with the best in the world.
#
We can do anything we want.
#
And that knowledge is important that we don't have to make excuses.
#
We don't have to talk about our great past or our great civilisation or whatever.
#
We can be the best in the present.
#
And that knowledge is important, at least now, you know, now I have a similar question
#
about Indian sport, that there was always this assumption.
#
And I have to say that for a large period of time, even I shared it, that India will
#
never be a great sporting nation because of a variety of reasons, like one, of course,
#
we don't really have a sporting culture.
#
The way kids say in Australia will in their free time, they'll just go out and play sports.
#
And over here, they won't do that.
#
They may watch some sports, but that sporting culture isn't there.
#
And one ascribed various reasons to it.
#
People would say that, you know, it's a genes and, you know, it's a climate and it's a nutrition
#
or maybe it's just a vicious cycle of a cultural practice.
#
It's not there in the culture.
#
So it never comes into the culture and so on and so forth.
#
But it seems to me that just as perhaps what Ajay was talking about, you know, the post
#
91 reforms, whatever happened, showing that India can be the best, can do anything.
#
It seems to me that in sport, a similar thing has now happened.
#
Like when you see Neeraj Chopra win the Javelin gold medal, you cannot anymore say that there
#
is something inherent that is keeping us back.
#
In fact, Nandan, in your excellent book, Go, you know, you wrote the last chapter of the
#
book and there you spoke about the importance of the Abhinav Bindra moment.
#
That made such a difference that, you know, he wins the gold and suddenly you have this
#
self confidence that we can do it, which wasn't there earlier.
#
So tell me a bit about the impact that it had, because at one level, it's just a matter
#
If somebody else had just done a little bit better, he wouldn't have got the gold.
#
He would have gotten the silver and we've gotten silver before.
#
Would it have made such an impact?
#
Was it a seminal moment?
#
And tell me about kind of what you feel about that.
#
So it was also the time when we had just begun our journey as a foundation, Go Sports Foundation.
#
And our dream was really this is to change the mindset and the belief system of what
#
is possible, not just for the athletes, but also for the surrounding ecosystem and people
#
who participate in those journeys and including stakeholders like parents, coaches, school
#
principals, college principals.
#
So the point is that, like you mentioned, there were many, many, many stereotypes in
#
Indian sport, which had actually seeped into the management of sport.
#
So we had these concepts of priority disciplines and non-priority disciplines.
#
Based on that, the government would fund different federations.
#
So if you were a talented athlete in a non-priority sport, you probably had zero chance of making
#
So it wasn't talent based.
#
I mean, we had limited sports budgets.
#
So let's be clear, this was not a priority for many, many, many years.
#
So we moved towards funding some athletes.
#
Most of them are just so happy to get there because of the number of obstacles overcome
#
to get to the Olympics.
#
And I'll just back up before the Abhinav Bindra story to around the same time.
#
At that point, I've gone to the UK, studied in the UK and the US and now come back to
#
India very, very passionate about doing something meaningful in sport.
#
I haven't found what that is yet.
#
But one day I just get a call from one of my law school colleagues and he says, hey,
#
I'm at the Bangalore airport.
#
This is the HAL old airport.
#
And I've just come upon one of the stars of the Indian hockey team.
#
So this guy is trying to get to the Sai Centre, Bangalore, which is pretty far away.
#
It's close to the National Law School, Kingeri.
#
And he's standing at the auto stand and no auto is willing to take him.
#
So this is an Indian national hockey player.
#
And he said, we got to do something.
#
So he literally picks him up, goes and drops him at Sai, comes back and we begin the relationship.
#
I do things like including filling up his Arjuna Award application, which he eventually
#
But on the day of his Arjuna Award, they do these lots of interviews at the Ashok Hotel.
#
So I'm there, he's talking and the journalist asks him, so what has the journey been like?
#
And he says, I can't even tell you because we are literally sent out to represent India
#
telling us you're going to lose anyway.
#
So just have a good time and come back.
#
And this is our national, I mean, quasi de facto national sport, which we won so much
#
So to me, that was such a telling moment and a heartbreaking moment.
#
But what Abhinav's moment was, a lot of people, I think, don't cut him the slack saying he
#
got all the facilities.
#
I think despite having all the facilities, he still went through the motions of doing
#
And if you read his book, and I really recommend it, A Short-Hit History is one of the great
#
sports books worldwide, not even talking Indian book, Rohit Brijnath and him have written
#
The number of journeys he went through to get there.
#
And to me, that is the moment for Indian sport, which also came around the IPL as well.
#
So 2008 is our 1983 moment or the 1991 moment.
#
Lots changed and lots changed in the mind.
#
And I still talk to Abhinav a lot and we talk about what it takes to win that medal.
#
And so much of it is in the mind.
#
So you can go to the Olympics, world champion, you can go to the Olympics, world number one,
#
And you can convince yourself all you want.
#
The more and more you try and do that, the tougher and tougher it gets because it's sort
#
of the Olympic moment is between your ears.
#
So it's the stadium, but also between your ears.
#
But what he did is change the self-talk of the Indian athlete because it became from
#
if he can do it, I can do it, and then we can do it.
#
So just beginning to connect the dots on what is possible as an Indian.
#
And to me that it needed a single breakthrough as a gold medal, like it needed breakthroughs
#
of different sorts, even Olympic qualification in a sport we thought we were never good at
#
or did not have a chance in.
#
So each athlete is building on the other.
#
And by Abhinav's moment, there had been enough to make that an incremental but very, very
#
And in our book, Rohit Brijnath talks about it, the we can moment of the belief that we
#
And a lot of people ask, so we've been through now 12 years of working in Indian sport with
#
And a lot of people say, OK, how do you measure this?
#
And tell me what's happened?
#
Is all the money worth it?
#
We put in so much CSR fund, the government funds so much.
#
So what has really changed?
#
And I mean, it certainly helps to have an Olympic medal tally, which is our best ever.
#
But my answer is always I may not be able to measure it, but qualitatively, I can feel
#
I have met athletes over the years.
#
The way they stand, the way they hold themselves, the way they look you in the eye, what they
#
say, the language of expression, not just how they say things, but what they say has
#
And to me, that is indicative of a confident, self-aware, but also a well-resourced athlete.
#
And I think we'll get to that of how they become well-resourced.
#
And absolutely critical is knowing that nothing has not been done when you're standing at
#
that shooting range, in the sort of boxing ring, whatever else.
#
The confidence, what is confidence?
#
Confidence is knowing that there was nothing else you could have done to get to where you
#
are and prepared everything that you could have possibly done to deal with uncertainty
#
of competitor, location, various different things.
#
And I think that transformation was Abhinav's, but it was the transformation of everyone
#
who came before him as well.
#
So bronze turned to silver, silver turned to gold.
#
And I think we've taken a couple of Olympics to get the legacy effect of that.
#
And I'm so glad it happened, this Olympics.
#
It's a huge, huge moment and a huge load of Abhinav's back, because I think one of the
#
quotes we have in our book there is that it's great being the first one, but I don't want
#
I think he's finally got his wish.
#
Yeah, and in a sense, you could argue that subsequent gold medals also have something
#
to do with his gold medal, as you pointed out.
#
I loved your definition of confidence because it focuses on process.
#
I've done everything I can to get here and thus you're confident and you just do what
#
you have to do, which is such a wonderful and inspiring definition.
#
But one of the things that struck me, and it struck me also when I read this recent
#
piece that you wrote in Deccan Herald, is that Indian sports, not just authorities and
#
federations, but also fans, tend to be too results oriented.
#
In your piece, you were speaking about the support that athletes need and you wrote,
#
quote, career pathways require incremental reward towards the athlete's journey.
#
Instead, central and state governments reserve huge monetary rewards for medal winners, while
#
exceptional athletes deserve every accolade.
#
Such a system can skew the balance between process and outcomes, stop quote.
#
And even when I think about this Olympics, right, Neeraj threw 87 points, something,
#
We are all celebrating that because, hey, he won the gold.
#
You know, Johannes Wetter, for example, I think threw more than 90 meters seven times
#
this year already, and it's almost routine for him.
#
So let's say he hadn't won the gold, but he had thrown 87.
#
Now, my argument would be that it is deserving of equal celebration equally.
#
You know, somebody was cribbing on Twitter about how our boxing guys and wrestling guys
#
are placed so high in the world, but they didn't really, you know, win any gold.
#
And my argument there is it doesn't matter.
#
You can't be too results oriented.
#
The fact that they're rated so high in the world, they won world championships and all
#
that shows you that the process is working.
#
Fans don't often get this.
#
You know, I'm sure sports sports people obviously do because that's the secret of success, right?
#
You focus on process and not outcome, but fans don't get this and sporting bodies don't
#
Do you see this as a mindset issue that still has to change that you look at the performance
#
and not necessarily the result that if Neeraj throws 87.5, that's a great throw regardless
#
of whether it gets a gold or whether it's outside the top four, which it might well
#
have been on a different day.
#
What are your respective thoughts on this?
#
So look, my point about this is that Neeraj winning is a great thing, but I am completely
#
My point is everyone is not going to understand, therefore, you'll need a few results.
#
But the point of it is that Nandan is absolutely right.
#
It's process and it's process that gets you to a particular position.
#
The sad bad fact of it is that if you're a cricketer, you're going to get 50 chances
#
through the year to prove whether you're right or wrong.
#
If you're an Olympic athlete, you're basically going to get the Olympics, possibly the Asian
#
Games, possibly the Commonwealth Games.
#
And remember, rarely do you are at least good at both the Asian Games and the Commonwealth
#
Games because the way it's queued, you know, if you're going safe towards the sprinting
#
event, the Commonwealth Games are a terrible place to be.
#
On the other hand, if you're playing badminton, the Asian Games is probably a more dangerous
#
So in any case, you basically have a one in two year chance of actually having a share
#
That's the pressure that's on the athlete.
#
And that is the fundamental issue that what also happens a lot is and see, federations
#
and even the government, everyone is not trusting because we've not had great results before
#
. So very often what happens is we actually keep sending athletes to ranking tournaments
#
to show the government, look, this guy is doing this, this guy is doing that.
#
And a lot of the times the Chinese and South Koreans, perhaps, you know, they've done more
#
They're more adept to the system.
#
So they'll say, look, we're not going to send athletes here.
#
So a lot of the archery events you'll see, you know, crucial archery events.
#
We remember Deepika Kumari winning a lot, but the South Koreans were not there.
#
The Chinese were not there.
#
They wouldn't come for an event like that.
#
But we needed to, because if we didn't go there and Deepika didn't win something, they
#
could turn around and say, you know, Deepika is not really informed.
#
So still as sporting people, even as a federation or a government body, we don't have the confidence.
#
We are not in a position to be able to say, you know, this athlete is good enough.
#
We'll let go of this event.
#
We'll focus on a peak during the Olympics.
#
These are very important things.
#
And I think this is the next stage in maturity.
#
Look, I am already, I'm quite happy the fact that we are sending athletes to exposure to
#
us because, you know, exposure to us and other tours are much better than not going anywhere
#
and not knowing exactly, you know, you're not sure what food to eat.
#
I remember the horror story that my brother-in-law told me, I think it was Shivnath Singh.
#
And Shivnath Singh was, before going to Montreal, he was in Oxford where my brother-in-law was
#
And he said, the guy just survived.
#
He didn't know what to eat.
#
He just survived on bread and milk because those are the only two things he would understand.
#
And there's nobody to cook for him.
#
And he's saying that this is what's happening to him in the UK where there is a little bit
#
of a support system of us around him.
#
What's going to happen to him in Montreal?
#
And those are the kind of things that, you know, athletes today at least have so much
#
more support, so much more understanding, people around them who are there to take care
#
So yes, we have matured, we've come a long way.
#
I think we need to take the next step and say that if this person is a premier athlete,
#
perhaps not participating in this and picking in the Olympics is more important than winning
#
this just to prove that he or she is a good athlete.
#
And that's one of the things I'd look at.
#
Yeah, I think that's brilliantly put.
#
Like I said, my mother was a cartoonist and I sometimes think of cartoons.
#
I've actually been very upset with Neeraj Chopra because he's destroyed my favourite
#
cartoon and that had essentially a cave mother talking to her two sons.
#
One of them is kicking around a round thing and the other is sort of going hunting with
#
And the mother is telling the young fellow, what do you think you're going to make money
#
kicking this round thing around?
#
Look at your brother, he's throwing a spear, right?
#
And no way you're going to be making money throwing a spear.
#
But I think here's Neeraj Chopra with I think tens of crores of reward destroyed my cartoon
#
along the way, but also has got some very random prizes as well.
#
But I think as Joy puts it, there's things that happen in the system as a result of this
#
type of what I call a bounty system is that you're going to be rewarded hugely if you're
#
successful and everyone else is in some sense left behind.
#
It breaks other parts of the system with this hypercompetitivism and also people using shortcuts.
#
There's a strong linkage of even doping because there's no consequence to getting caught.
#
The only consequence is if you don't get caught and you succeed, you might get some large
#
But Joy hit a very important point as well on how funding used to work.
#
And there's been a transformation in the last five, six, seven years with a pretty significant
#
government scheme called the Target Olympic podium scheme and how it worked with federations,
#
with other bodies as well.
#
But earlier, what you had was this push to show that you were world class by maintaining
#
And in many sports, you had to maintain rankings just by playing a lot.
#
So you figured out how to play a lot and how to game the systems.
#
And I think you've seen lots of examples even in chess of how to become a grandmaster or
#
even sort of paying off people to lose against you and stuff.
#
So huge amounts of effort, parental effort, athlete effort would be on getting to rankings
#
because funding depended on it.
#
There was a very ad hoc system of how athletes and particularly elite athletes would get
#
It would be given in smaller tranches based on rankings, performance, and it was a limited
#
pool which lots of people were fighting for, which also led to other stuff like we'd have
#
Wimbledon junior champions, but none of them would progress.
#
You had the Leander who broke through that.
#
And what you had was while European kids were already playing seniors, losing first round,
#
first round, first round, first round for half a year before they made it to second
#
And then, I mean, look at a Roger Federer story.
#
Our kids were still playing junior events because that was the only way to get funded.
#
And those breakages actually make a system because you aren't seeing people progress
#
You have to learn how to lose and get exposed to loss to begin winning.
#
And we didn't have that give in the system.
#
We were willing to fund people who had already proved themselves and how they had got there
#
was none of our business in some sense and willing to reward the people who had won.
#
But we had not necessarily seen the journey and the pathway there.
#
And like I said, there were other sort of things like we have priority sports.
#
We have shooting, boxing, wrestling.
#
We are going to say that these are the things worth focusing on because someone in the past
#
has broken through of their own accord, got some support and proved that Indians are capable
#
of winning a shooting medal, maybe a tennis medal, boxing, wrestling, weightlifting.
#
Now everything else, we are not competent and we convince ourselves, we convince our
#
donors, we convince our government.
#
Everyone is convinced that we can't be anything else.
#
We are good at these sports which require dexterity and speed and other things.
#
But don't talk about strength or stamina, running, all of that.
#
We just don't have the genes like you said, we don't have aptitude, there's no point
#
And that is a system that has gone through, I would say, reformation in the last eight
#
And there are various reasons for that which we could chat about too.
#
Yeah, a lot of fascinating stands and big questions to pick up on.
#
And I'll come back to your personal journey at a later point in time.
#
But first, a few questions, but as far as the cartoon is concerned, it's still kind
#
of valid because I can guarantee you that the hundred best footballer in the world makes
#
way way more money than the hundred best javelin thrower.
#
So I don't think that kind of balance sort of remains.
#
As far as chess grandmasters, gaming norms and all that is concerned, that's extreme
#
Those guys don't really get anywhere.
#
You know, in some obscure corner of the Soviet Union, they'll have these fictitious tournaments
#
which never even happen and rating is kind of given.
#
But that is such an outlier, it doesn't matter.
#
One of the strands I want to pick up on is also then these trade offs that you mentioned.
#
Like on the one hand, you know, Joy was talking about the trade off that one, when you're
#
supporting athletes, you want to take them towards sporting excellence.
#
So you want to space out their training, you want them to peak at the right time.
#
But on the other hand, you also have to satisfy another constituency and build those narratives
#
So you send him to random tournaments, which may not otherwise be good for him.
#
And the necessity of that trade off is worrisome and similar trade off and you mentioned about
#
Indian kids winning Wimbledon juniors, when people their age are already sort of playing
#
And this happens in chess also, by the way, that you know, for the last few years, the
#
best players don't take part in the world junior championships because they're already
#
kind of fighting to get into the actual top 10.
#
This also sort of reminds me of what happens in women's chess.
#
Like people have this misconception that there is men's chess and women's chess.
#
But actually, there's no such thing as men's chess.
#
There's an open category where everyone plays and then there's a women's category because
#
for all kinds of reasons, you know, women haven't been able to get results of the open
#
category, historical reasons, social reasons, whatever bunch of stuff.
#
So you know, there have been women who have said that I will not play the women's category.
#
I will play the open category.
#
I will play with the boys.
#
I don't want a separate category.
#
And very notably, Judith Paulger reached the world top 10 in the open and you found who
#
She was women's world champion.
#
She dropped out of the cycle and is no longer women's world champion because she said I
#
will only play open events.
#
Similarly, a few years ago, there was this play called Alexandra Goriachkina.
#
So I think when she was 15 and 16, she won the girls junior world championship when she
#
was 15 and 16 and juniors was under 20.
#
And then she said that, no, I want to play the open.
#
And the next few years, she played the open junior championship and finished middle of
#
the field like 30th, 40th, whatever.
#
But she continued doing that.
#
And she's a very strong player today, but now she's back to playing women's events.
#
The juniors who would finish around her, the male juniors, 30th or 40th are probably earning
#
But you know, she could take part in the women's event and earn much better because that was
#
So similar kind of trade offs in play.
#
Is it getting better in terms of these trade offs and this perception management?
#
I understand that private involvement is much more.
#
You guys are funding all this.
#
We'll talk in detail about tops as well.
#
But is there on the one hand, not just a case for building a great product, but also marketing
#
that great product to the state, to the government, you know, how do you get that ranking?
#
Is that game still a problem or is there a period in time where that game is becoming
#
less and less of a problem because these results are gradually starting to come through?
#
So I'll pick up on that first, because I think, as I said, Nandan is in that thing of, you
#
know, some of what he's doing is involved with it.
#
Maybe I was as well, I spent six months doing some work with the Go Sports Foundation from
#
the best things I ever did.
#
But I think it's getting better.
#
I think what had happened right to the start is when tops came, everyone thought, you know,
#
is tops an all or nothing?
#
You know, this is what it is.
#
They're going to fund it.
#
They're going to do it.
#
There are some things that a government cannot do and there are reasons for that.
#
Their government policies, their government decisions, a simple thing, you know, do you
#
want to fly an athlete business class?
#
Now, it may be necessary for some events.
#
It may not be necessary, but for some events, it may actually be necessary.
#
That kind of extra sleep, that kind of extra rest may be useful.
#
Now tops could not do that.
#
It's difficult for a tops to do that given the system that we follow.
#
Or do you need a separate physio?
#
And some people are just comfortable with a particular physio or some people are comfortable
#
that their mother travels with them.
#
Now that may drop off in time, that person, that athlete may mature in time.
#
But right at the start in their first few tournaments, they may need that family support.
#
Now those are things that the government cannot do.
#
So what has happened is right in the beginning, there was, you know, everyone thought it's
#
either tops or these private schemes.
#
And I think what's happened over the last three, four years, and especially the last
#
couple of years, very successfully is both of them have realized that for Indian athletes
#
to succeed, they need to go hand in hand.
#
And in fact, I remember being part of a series of seminars with Olympic athletes, which was
#
all about giving them an understanding what the idea of India as it were in a very simple
#
ported, if I would put it, and what Tokyo is all about and what they could expect to
#
find out there in very practical terms, not just in terms of the thing, but what are Japanese
#
like, what the city is going to be.
#
And it was researched and put together by Go Sports Foundation.
#
But the athletes were bought in by tops.
#
And that gives you a little bit of an idea about the fact that these guys are now they're
#
saying, it's not my product, it's not your product.
#
These athletes win, it's going to be good for all of us.
#
And I think that is the one huge thing in Indian sport that we're seeing.
#
And right into 2015, 16, when top started, it was all about it's my way or the highway.
#
And I think everyone now realizes that the only way to make a highway is if everyone
#
gets together to try and build it.
#
I would totally agree and seeing that experience from the other end as well.
#
I mean, there's no I in team, but there's more than one in team India, right?
#
So the recognition that there are many, many participants and every athlete is India's
#
It's not a government athlete or private athlete or some other scheme.
#
And that really came through in the last five, six years, a recognition that it's a common
#
journey and everyone has different roles to play.
#
The end of the day, the government is the biggest funder of an activity like sport.
#
Huge amounts go into the other programs of athletes, high performance, tournament experts.
#
But at the same time, like Joy mentions, the government is inherently obliged to be transactional.
#
There are protocols that has to follow.
#
There are ways of doing public money.
#
So there's room to build other things, to focus and support the government, complement
#
the government, doing things that the government cannot do or is not yet ready to do.
#
And in many ways, the private involvement is not by any means a sort of a capture or
#
should not be seen as something which you're doing, which the government should have been
#
doing and you're trying to show the government off as not doing it.
#
And that's been the moment that has now come where it feels like everyone is participating,
#
knows their role and is actively pushing a common agenda.
#
And a lot of that credit goes to the people running the top scheme and the sports ministry.
#
That seven medals is actually an under reward for the amount of managerial work, the amount
#
of funding and the amount of support that our contingent got.
#
I'm so glad that we got to seven, but not just the athletes, but everyone who put the
#
work in there to me deserve more.
#
And the fact that we expected more and feel like we deserve more tells the story that
#
we had our best Olympics, but it could have been and should have been better.
#
And I'll get to the details of that in a short while.
#
But there's a meta question I want to ask first, which is slightly long winded, if you
#
It's something that I haven't quite been able to reconcile for myself, which is off state
#
involvement in sport, right?
#
Which is that for all of these sports, we depend on the state and its federations and
#
And the point is one has to wonder how that is sort of palatable or justifiable in a country
#
Like in India, 3000 children die in India every day from starvation.
#
One in four Indian children are malnourished.
#
We are a desperately poor country.
#
There's an opportunity cost for money.
#
And the question is that is it okay to spend it on a space program or on sports?
#
And obviously, in my opinion, every reasonable person can argue that we should not be building
#
giant statues, but it becomes more thorny when you talk about sports and space programs
#
because national pride is tied in with them.
#
And this reminds me of a story that I sometimes tell about Tolstoy and his chicken.
#
So essentially Tolstoy, of course, was vegetarian and he wrote books about ethical treatment
#
of animals and all of that.
#
So at one point in time, an aunt of his was coming to dinner and she said, I will only
#
So he said, okay, fine, come.
#
So when the aunt gets to the dining table, she finds that there is a live chicken flapping
#
And Tolstoy tells her that you wanted chicken, here's your chicken, we're not going to kill
#
And that seems to me to be a very almost Gandhian demonstration.
#
And Gandhi was, of course, influenced by Tolstoy, a Gandhian demonstration of the difference
#
between the chicken on the chair and the chicken on the plate, that they are actually one and
#
But, you know, we have this mental barrier between it.
#
And I think we do a similar thing in sport, where we think that government spending on
#
sport, you know, state funds going into, you know, athletics and this and that is such a
#
beautiful noble thing and all of that.
#
But there is a cost to it.
#
And the cost to it at some level includes the 3000 children dying every day of starvation.
#
You know, obviously, it is not the case that the government stopped funding say fencing,
#
children would stop dying.
#
Obviously, not the case, it would go into somebody's pocket for you know, but that's
#
a dilemma that we face.
#
And my sense is that this connection between the state and sport is really because of reasons
#
that can shade over that essentially has both sides to it.
#
You know, you could say that it is self respect and esteem of the kind that you know, we might
#
have felt when we watch Gavaskar play all the defined innings that he played.
#
But on the other hand, it's it's this kind of toxic nationalism, you know, but Orwell
#
famously said, the sport is war minus shooting.
#
And you know, so that's, you know, one counter view to the state in sport.
#
That's kind of the side that we don't see.
#
I mean, this is a scene in the unseen, so to say, and a follow up minor question that
#
arises from that is you were drawing the comparison in that cartoon between football and javelin.
#
And the point is, why will the kid kicking the ball makes him so much more money?
#
It's because so many more people watch the sport, they care about football, they deeply
#
care about it, and there's a lot of money going into it, and it's our eyeballs that
#
are directly funding all the sports that we watch, which I'm perfectly fine with as it
#
But you could also argue that a lot of sports, these Olympic sports are perhaps archaic artifacts
#
that, you know, no one would watch if it wasn't for this whole thing of national pride through
#
So I'm not taking a stand one way or the other.
#
I'm raising this because I'm conflicted about it.
#
Because to me, one of my best moments this year was, you know, when Neeraj won the gold
#
or other things that I've seen in sport that I otherwise wouldn't, you know, if not for
#
But at the same time, there is this other aspect of it.
#
How does one reconcile these two?
#
Is this something that you've thought about?
#
And also, Nandan, specifically in your case, where you've done so much work sort of mobilizing
#
the voluntary action of private individuals towards promoting sport, which is kind of
#
the way I would really love to see all of it happen, that is there a way of seeing sport
#
go forward without the necessary involvement of the state as it is in some sports in other
#
You know, like the British government doesn't have to promote football.
#
You know, the Premier League is all there.
#
You know, even the BCCI is kind of independent and the IPL is its own ecosystem.
#
But with other sports, we have to always think of the state getting involved.
#
So what are your respective thoughts on this?
#
It's a great question, because it's at the center of I think the future of Indian sport
#
We do have this notion that if anything goes wrong in sport, it's the government's fault.
#
So I mean, someone like runs with a bull and supposedly runs faster than Usain Bolt, the
#
sports minister is supposed to call him for a trial, someone I mean, it's literally everything
#
that happens is the government's responsibility with sport.
#
And that's how also a lot of these schemes have been built.
#
The government is building the Kelo India youth games, university games, there's a talent
#
scouting, there's sports hostels, infrastructure, name it.
#
And the government is the biggest sports management company in the country.
#
The reality is that a lot of this in the sports governance structure, international sports
#
governance structure is to be done by federations.
#
And we haven't got there yet in transferring in some sense responsibility, but also operational
#
integrity to our federations in a cogent clear way, because we've been so government centric
#
when you ask the government, government will deliver because that's what the population
#
What we haven't moved towards is the US model, the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee gets
#
probably zero funding from from the government.
#
It is also all sponsored driven, all driven by private enterprise, pushed up by university
#
So we found micro enterprises, we found sponsors, we found boosters in different places.
#
For us, the other than the BCCI, the government, some state governments are the funder of first
#
resort and the funder of last resort.
#
What it does in some sense is it absolves also a lot of the federations of responsibility
#
because of the way that the sports governance framework has been built.
#
Not to say that all federations are run badly.
#
And I think you saw the results of some well run federations, transformative results in
#
the Olympics as well, including hockey, which I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit more.
#
But the reality is there are dozens and dozens of federations.
#
And I mean, we've had many conferences on this.
#
And one of our speakers talked about a bunch of these federations called kitchen table
#
governance, where literally the president and secretary sit in someone's kitchen and
#
And there are really no implications for that worldwide.
#
Federations are supposed to be private autonomous bodies, which may get some funding from the
#
But that autonomy is to be enjoyed with certain responsibilities to run tournaments, to run
#
events, to do talent scouting.
#
So essentially to deliver talent opportunities and to convert talent into opportunities and
#
opportunities into competitiveness.
#
And that is where we in some sense have failed when the government doesn't enforce a governance
#
framework where that autonomy is earned.
#
What you end up doing is the government doing all of it in itself, because one constant
#
there, whether the federations do it or the government does it, it's government's money.
#
So either the governments fund the federations or they do the schemes themselves.
#
Now what happens is if you're given that binary choice, saying it's your money, you can either
#
go and execute Hello India games, talent scouting, sports hostels, big infrastructure yourself
#
and have accountability, or you can pass it on to others and you may get a report once
#
a year if you're lucky, which is the one you're going to choose.
#
And to me, there is a gap and perhaps Joy can talk a little bit more about it in our
#
willingness to sort of call out federations who aren't doing their job, because at the
#
end of the day, these federations are monopolies by law and these are not monopolies created
#
by Indian law or any national law.
#
These are self-professed monopolies worldwide.
#
So they get their recognition from international bodies, which are also not tied to any country.
#
So they are recognized by the international federation and claim some serious dominion
#
over the sport, where you can't move, you can't enter what is called the sports pyramid
#
without their permission.
#
Now when you're running a monopoly, that monopoly with an autonomy is a pretty sort of challenging
#
dish to serve if you don't have responsibility tied to that.
#
So are you handing over the keys to an entire gamut of activities, from doing events to
#
selecting, determining who represents India, using the national flag, and in some sense
#
curating identity of what we are capable of and what we are not.
#
And some of it could just be simply from inaction.
#
So are you saying that you're going to hand over the keys and you don't care if the person
#
starts the engine, right?
#
And that is where there are gaps.
#
And if we want to move from this government funded, we will do everything because people
#
expect us to, to we will enable, build the legal frameworks.
#
And I'm a lawyer and I'll always come from that, build the infrastructure that needs
#
That, I mean, land and power of the state are the only things that the state really
#
has monopoly over, get experts to do the work of each sport.
#
But that is going to come, you're going to get private participation, you're going to
#
get private enterprise when there is accountability and responsibility and a fair chance to participate
#
on decent terms for private enterprise to come in and not get kicked out in two or three
#
years because something else has grown better or that investment is not protected.
#
And we've seen so many examples of this in Indian sport, multiple leagues, multiple different
#
examples where private enterprise, you come and take the risk.
#
If it turns out well, we will co-opt and we don't need you anymore.
#
If you're losing money, keep continuing to lose money and we're thankful to you.
#
And I'm sure Joy has a lot to say on this topic.
#
And I think where I'm going to start off, first and foremost, you know, every year there's
#
It's a dance between what they call Sai and the Ministry of Sports and the Federations.
#
So Sai and the Ministry, basically the Sai and the Ministry of Sport have a particular
#
budget to dole out to federations.
#
For my listeners, we should elaborate Sai is a sports authority of India.
#
Sports authority of India.
#
So every year all these federations go out there and they have their plans and they say,
#
this is what we're going to do.
#
And 90% of the federations will get money from no other source other than this.
#
You know, they'll put out an auction to say, where will we hold the nationals and somebody
#
who will do the nationals because, you know, they want to do it this year and they want
#
to be probably president next year.
#
And they'll do it in a particular city and they'll do it in a particular way.
#
This is the cycle followed.
#
So I just want to tell you about something about the federation, which is actually fairly
#
well run because I've worked with it, which is the football federation.
#
And I remember in 2015, we were working on the under 17 football world cup.
#
And so we were required to present to the All India Football Federation general body
#
meeting that, you know, how is the world cup progressing?
#
So we are there for the meeting.
#
And just before us, there's a few points of orders.
#
So the general secretary of the football federation turns around and says, and Bhai Cheng Bhutia
#
is there at the meeting.
#
And I think he's also there for some of the reasons to talk about some of the projects.
#
And mind you, so all these guys who have come to this meeting are guys who have been flown
#
in by the All India Football Federation, they'll stay for two days at a hotel, they'll attend
#
these meetings and they'll go back.
#
Maybe each of them, you know, each state, probably a lack of rupees is being spent just
#
So one of the points of order was that they said that, you know, the registration fees
#
for each local federation is 500 rupees, 500 rupees a year for a local state federation.
#
And they said that, you know, that has to be increased because, you know, there's a
#
lot of paperwork, you're increasing it to 10,000 rupees a year because, you know, that's
#
And four federations, including India's most popular state, got up and said, how can you
#
And at that point, Bhai Cheng Bhutia, who was there, he just could not believe it.
#
And he says that, you know, if in India's most popular state, the world's most popular
#
game cannot raise 10,000 rupees, then probably the wrong people are running it.
#
And there was chaos in that meeting and everything.
#
But that was so absolutely true.
#
I'll tell you something, Amit.
#
A lot of the people who are running these federations and a lot of they are good federations
#
as Nandan will, you know, hasten to tell you and as I will.
#
But in 90 percent of cases, it's not just the fact that the federations are corrupt
#
Many of them are corrupt.
#
But in a lot of cases, they are just unable.
#
So if you turn on and give a federation two crores and say, OK, do a national game, which
#
is proper, they wouldn't know how to do it because they don't know how to deal with those
#
kinds of sums of money.
#
They don't know how to scale up.
#
A lot of them don't know how to use a computer properly.
#
A lot of them wouldn't be able to use an Excel sheet.
#
So the problem is that Indian sport is hugely undermined by the federations.
#
And I'll tell you why this is happening in early days.
#
You know, suppose you're table tennis.
#
OK, now table tennis was played and there were certain places, you know.
#
So Maharashtra had some table tennis, Kerala had some table tennis, Bengal had some table
#
tennis, Jailways had some table tennis.
#
The other states, they were not that strong in table tennis, Assam had some table tennis.
#
What would happen is, suppose you're Uttarakhand table tennis.
#
So somebody who wants to win the next elections inside the table tennis federation would ask
#
a cousin or relative, somebody in Uttarakhand and say, hey, do you want to be the head of
#
the Uttarakhand table tennis federation?
#
And they'll think, hey, why not?
#
They said, look, you want to come bound for the national games, you'll get a couple of
#
All you need to do is vote for me.
#
And you don't really need to know anything about table tennis.
#
So that's how a lot of these state federations sort of started putting their own people in,
#
voters in, often who had nothing to do with the game.
#
And what we are dealing with is still that system.
#
We are dealing with that system, those people, and therefore also one, incompetent people,
#
people who don't know the game, see people who have no idea what to do if money actually
#
comes into the sport because they're not capable of running.
#
And those are the essential problems that we are dealing with.
#
As I said, you know, Nandan will tell you at this point in time, I don't think the lack
#
of money is India's problem at all in sport.
#
And if you go to the private sector and you tell them that, okay, this is a project we
#
can do and this is a project, these are the deliverables and this is how we can do it.
#
You can raise the money.
#
It's lack of competency, it's the federations who are the roadblocks.
#
So you know, extremely insightful points and speaking of lack of competency, speaking about
#
people who might not know what to do if the money comes to them.
#
And also the very valid point that you made that these are not necessarily bad people.
#
All of this gets me to thinking about structure and incentives.
#
And this is something I think we might have discussed in the last episode we did together
#
and Nandan just alluded to it.
#
So as you know, Nandan mentioned all our federations through accidents of circumstances or whatever,
#
the way sporting federations throughout the world have evolved is that one, they are monopolies
#
to their also monopsony.
#
So not only will say the federation of archery have a monopoly on archery, anyone who wants
#
to do archery has to, you know, register with the federation and play under their auspices
#
But they also have no one else to sell their services to, which makes them incredibly powerful
#
and without any accountability, where does accountability come from?
#
It typically comes from competition.
#
Now in this case, within their sport, their monopolies and monopsony is you could argue
#
that each sport is competing with every other sport.
#
So that might be a kind of accountability, but that plays out only over the long run
#
and is no relief to say a current archer who finds that, you know, there is deep nepotism
#
within his federation or whatever.
#
Also as far as the question of autonomy and accountability come, this becomes a very difficult
#
balance I would imagine, because, you know, a government can say that, okay, ex federation,
#
you are now autonomous, but to keep you accountable, these are the following reporting procedures
#
you will have to follow or benchmarks you will have to meet because that still gives
#
the state a certain amount of power over them and power always corrupts and these inevitably
#
become sort of rent seeking operations.
#
Now what we saw on cricket and where the IPL was so good is that the IPL proved a jugaru
#
way out of the monopsony problem that if you were a cricketer, you weren't only selling
#
your talent to the BCCI, you could sell your talent separately to, you know, Mumbai Indians
#
or royal challengers or whatever you had these people competing for your services and you
#
also had these people competing to discover new talent because that's how the incentive
#
suddenly worked in that new structure.
#
So you still had BCCI, which is a monopoly and a monopsony and which used that monopsony
#
stick power to shut down the ICL, for example, and to make sure no one would compete with
#
But you know, that jugaru set up within it of the IPL where there is competition on all
#
fronts made the lives of so many Indian cricketers much better off to the extent that I imagine
#
that the IPL had been around when you had to make your difficult choice and then you
#
might well have thought, okay, no, there are so many options, I'll just continue with cricket.
#
One doesn't know, but on the margins, I think that would be the kind of difference that
#
Now how do we get past this is what I kind of don't understand because it seems to me
#
that these structures are things that we are stuck with and this is not a uniquely Indian
#
problem, of course, because rent seeking is so natural and inherent to our entire systems
#
This just fits into that.
#
But this problem of federations, which are monopoly and monopsony are true all across
#
It just permeates through.
#
So what are the ways through that?
#
Is there a point at which this just becomes something that we have to excel in spite of?
#
Or is it possible to reform the system in structural ways that I possibly can't imagine,
#
but you're a lawyer and then you've thought about the structural aspects of this obviously
#
and how rules of the game can reform a system like this.
#
So I'd love insights from both of you because both of you have, you know, while I am really
#
sprouting theory right now, both of you have been on the ground, no doubt, you know, running
#
into countless frustrations, dealing with these federations and, you know, coming from
#
people who are otherwise perfectly good human beings and good individuals and well-meaning
#
people, but they're responding to the incentives of the system.
#
Yeah, Amit, great question.
#
It's not an easy answer.
#
I will have to preface by saying governance is an incredibly difficult job in sport.
#
The sport in general has so many different stakeholders and everyone is coming with different
#
interests, very, very different interests.
#
So an athlete may have an interest, the parent may have a completely different interest from
#
So might the coach, you'll have teams, you have federations, you have the government,
#
you have private enterprise, you have sponsors trying to come in, you have broadcasters.
#
So there's a whole bunch of people, considerate people trying to take from some sort of a
#
And there's a great story that Rahul Dravid tells about what a team environment is about.
#
He talks about it being a pot of energy, which every individual has to give to so that they
#
And particularly relevant, I think, in a sport like cricket, which is an individual sport
#
And that is really what sport is, is that there are multiple people trying to give a
#
little and take a lot from sport.
#
And what is governance?
#
Governance is balancing these various interests in the sort of keeping this interest of sport,
#
this sort of mythical beast, the interest of sport as the priority.
#
So you'll take the money from the broadcaster, but what sort of rights will you give the
#
You will allow the athlete an opportunity to train, but what if the athlete is not doing
#
So there's constantly people trying to give less and take more from sport.
#
And in general, really, sport determines when you get something back, you really can't be
#
And the issue is when you have governance in a way that is not structured with accountability,
#
the ability to be extractive with participation of people who are in the federations goes
#
So already a difficult task with some misaligned incentives.
#
What has changed in more recent years is the emergence of the sort of excellent athlete
#
from federations who have really not maybe done that much in time as well.
#
And to me, a little bit of this competition issue was solved by this target Olympic podium
#
scheme, which was really agnostic to which sport you came from.
#
If you showed Olympic qualification or podium potential, they would pick you and then also
#
work with the federation to make sure everything was OK.
#
So it became almost an Indian Olympic program, which didn't go into priority sport, which
#
It looked at each athlete as an individual.
#
What it did is it brought people together and said, come and help us.
#
Do you have an athlete in some sense that deserves this?
#
We've had wonderful cases of people who have never qualified for the Olympics before from
#
their sport now progressively come from a foundation like ours.
#
So we had the first fencer make it to the Olympics.
#
That person got a chance because this is we're talking about Bhavani Devi, because the Tamil
#
Nadu state government supported her.
#
We as a foundation supported her at a point when she was considering quitting sport.
#
And I think she's gone on record to say we had the selection interview.
#
If we had not selected her and she didn't expect to be selected because fencing and
#
why fencing, she was going to quit the sport.
#
And the reality is for five or six years, we worked with her, the government, and eventually
#
the top scheme took over, which is a fantastic public-private collaboration, because it was
#
something that the government could not have really funded.
#
When you have 150 other athletes in line above her, why would you pick a fencer when India
#
has never qualified at fencing?
#
So what you got was in some sense this jugado, like the equivalent of an IPL, multiple different
#
people trying to solve problems together.
#
In some sense, problems that could not be solved by the other was solved and handed
#
over in a way that when the person was ready for that support.
#
So in some sense, the success of these last six or seven years has been that collaboration
#
between the private and the public.
#
The federation is recognizing a little bit more that having an excellent high-performance
#
athlete is not always a threat.
#
And I think it's an opportunity as well to grow your sport.
#
I know it sounds absurd when I say that, I mean, you would expect you want top-class
#
athletes, but many of them are just happy to not be in the limelight, to just do their
#
own thing along the side, travel to the Olympics, even if you don't have an athlete at the Olympics.
#
You might be Handball Federation or something where you're going to the Olympics without
#
a team there, but suddenly you have an athlete.
#
There's a gradual recognition of the opportunity a prime athlete in a sport sort of can deliver.
#
And we've seen that in many ways, you look at it as the athlete as sort of top of the
#
pyramid in an ecosystem in the way that you have sort of a predator, the health of the
#
predators, the health of the system.
#
And we've seen like you take a fencer, you suddenly expose the system to a fencer.
#
People learn about fencing, physiotherapists learn how to deal with a fencer, coaches sort
#
of have to upgrade their skills.
#
So suddenly a system starts working and sometimes all it takes is one athlete.
#
And this is not even one athlete winning a gold medal or any medal, making that leap
#
to be good enough to get prominence.
#
Greatest stage on earth, attention is directed towards the Olympics and we have to figure
#
out how to capture the value of not just the medals, but all of these breakthrough achievements.
#
And we failed in many instances.
#
So the previous Olympics, the thing we as Go Sports Foundation were proudest of was
#
Deepa Karmakar, a gymnast.
#
What have we done five years later?
#
I mean, we had a gymnast qualified through the sort of solidarity quota, but we have
#
not developed a pathway.
#
We have not developed a legacy.
#
This brilliant, brilliant achievement by this girl coming fourth at the Olympics.
#
Have we captured the value in the performance system?
#
Have we captured the value of that performance more broadly in society?
#
My guess is perhaps not.
#
And while things are improving, we really have to be clear on why we're going after
#
the medals and to build a legacy plan for every single medal, but also every single
#
breakthrough sort of achievement.
#
You have your first equestrian, you have your first female sailor, you have your first fencer.
#
Are you out there building the next generation in 10 years, in 15 years, are you going to
#
have your Abhinav Bindra moment where a 10 or 12 year old who's watched that achievement
#
goes through the cycle and is ready to emulate?
#
And those are the questions to ask in the setup of competition, but also the building
#
To answer very briefly your question in a sort of a legal technical manner, the issue
#
of autonomy, accountability and interference is a very live one.
#
It's in fact, in the courts, in the Delhi High Court, one of my friends, Rahul Mehra
#
has been fighting this battle for years and years.
#
I think he's not very well liked for obvious reasons by the federations.
#
But looking back 20 years from now, I think we will thank him for what he has done in
#
terms of building wonderful legal precedent on recognizing the public function that these
#
So what is now the public function test for private organizations that the sports bodies
#
What we do have is a sports code, which is essentially an accountability framework saying
#
we'll recognize your autonomy, but it is conditional autonomy.
#
I mean, you're an autonomous vehicle.
#
You still have to follow the rules of the road.
#
You can't be an autonomous random vehicle, you'll be crashing into people and other vehicles.
#
So there's standards, it's financial integrity, operational integrity.
#
Are you holding enough tournaments?
#
But the sad part is, and I've been on a committee to try and reform that, we have a 2011 version
#
of the code that's not passed.
#
I mean, there's an element of people with the power to change things, being stakeholders
#
Even the existing one is not being implemented to the fullest extent possible because there
#
are just too many lapses to justify inaction.
#
And if you're going to give people the keys, like I said, you have to make sure that they're
#
And while we can take the government to task if we perform badly, the likely outcome is
#
that you're going to have more and more and more centralization and government doing and
#
solving if you do not fix the ability and the accountability on federations who are
#
otherwise going to continue to enjoy the sort of the benefits of power without the responsibility
#
because in some sense, the job has been outsourced to the government and you're seeing results,
#
you're seeing things happen and those collaborations will be very limited collaborations.
#
So do you want to get there?
#
Number one, fix the sports code, fix accountability framework.
#
Number two, and sort of an underdone aspect of sport law in India, and I mean, committed
#
from regulatory perspective, is the role of competition law, antitrust law and how it
#
applies to sports situations.
#
It's evolved quite a bit in Europe.
#
So EU law and competition is significant.
#
You're seeing much more private participation, like there's a very famous case of the skating
#
There's a swimming, swimming league case.
#
You're seeing more and more the separation of the regulatory function and the commercial
#
function of sports federations with the right of private enterprise to not step on the toes
#
of federations in their regulatory function, but have a neutral entry point to use stadia,
#
I mean, there's a lot of different things going on, making sure that players don't get
#
banned for playing in what are called private leagues.
#
But I mean, the US is full of private leagues, right?
#
Sort of 360 days of the year you're playing private leagues, five days a year you're sort
#
of going in representing your country.
#
So there's a lot of legal structural frameworks that need work.
#
I don't think we got there yet.
#
We're still sort of not even enforcing the frameworks we do have yet.
#
I'm not even going to, Nandan has taught me a lot over the last couple of years.
#
I've been dealing with him, especially, you know, with regard to the volleyball Federation
#
of India and whatever else that's happening.
#
I mean, I think the base of it is the truth is that, you know, first take a name like
#
BCCI, Board of Control, understand the words, control for cricket in India.
#
It's about controlling things.
#
And mind you, let's be honest, the BCCI has done the best job in the country of having
#
age level competitions, of making sure money comes into the system, of empowering the system.
#
And with all their internal politics, and there's been a lot of it and, you know, nobody
#
needs to talk about it, they've actually been not allowed most of that to get onto the field.
#
In fact, I feel 80s and 90s BCCI was far more, you know, far more on the field was being
#
impacted by what was happening inside boardrooms.
#
I think much less is now.
#
And I think those separations have happened.
#
So two things I want to talk about and I think, you know, a couple of years back, Nandan spoke
#
about a very important point, which is that what happens is that suppose you have something
#
like a sports court saying, you know, this is what happens.
#
Now where do, where do sat-raps in the Federation, where do sat-raps in the ministry get power?
#
They get power in the cracks.
#
They get power in the places which are ambiguous.
#
Whenever there's something ambiguous, then I sort of as a Federation official have a
#
right to decide, I'll go this way or that way, okay.
#
What we are trying to do or what people like Nandan are trying to do is making it as unambiguous
#
But when you make things unambiguous, the people in power don't have power.
#
They have to follow rules.
#
So there's a constant battle in every organization between people who are saying, can I make
#
as fair and transparent rule as possible?
#
And people saying, saying that if it is completely fair and completely transparent, I don't have
#
So that's the battle that's going on now.
#
And mind you, that's at a level which is always going to happen, okay.
#
At the lower level than that, it's a simple thing.
#
If you're a Federation, how does a sport develop?
#
A sport develops when you actually build a sport, when more games are held.
#
Now the only thing a Federation is doing is pitching to the government saying, okay, national
#
games will be held and that's all I have.
#
Then you're not really building the sport.
#
You don't really want to go out, a lot of these Federations don't really want to go
#
out and get too many sponsors because it's difficult.
#
And if I get a sponsor means I have to deliver them a product.
#
I have to show them, I have to put up their banners, I have to put it on TV because they're
#
going to ask these questions.
#
And look, I either am not efficient enough to do it or I don't want to be called into
#
question because somebody will ask me, yeah, I've given you 13 lakhs, what have you done
#
They don't want to be accountable.
#
So those are basic, basic issues and, you know, we dealt with the volleyball Federation.
#
This is one of the things that we realized that A, that once you deal with these people
#
or once you deal with them, firstly, the laws of the land and what Nandan was alluding to
#
say that they have absolutely no power, there's something called restraint of trade.
#
You cannot stop me from making a living.
#
So for example, if there is a volleyball league and I start another volleyball league, there
#
is no way anyone can stop me from allowing players in my league to make a living.
#
So legally, and there's huge amount of precedent in this, restraint of trade is something that
#
has never been used efficiently in India, but it's there.
#
And if tomorrow you want to pull it out, you win.
#
And I think the first, you know, changes have already happened.
#
And I'll give you a very good example, Kabaddi.
#
So Kabaddi, we all know, Mashal sport came and before that the Kabaddi Federation, nobody's
#
ever heard of Kabaddi, nobody's heard of Charu Sharma comes in, he speaks to Anand Mahindra
#
who introduces him to a lot of friends.
#
They get together, they start the Kabaddi league and to their eternal credit star says,
#
let's throw our weight behind it.
#
And they do, they really do in terms of the amount of publicity they give it, the amount
#
of space they give it, how well they put it together.
#
It's an object lesson because it's not an easy sport to make that popular, but they
#
Now, here's what happens.
#
What we don't know or don't talk about is in these four or five years that the Kabaddi
#
league has been operating, the Federation has changed three times over again.
#
Because once money has come into the Federation, all these guys are saying, look, all these
#
guys are making so much money.
#
Why are we not making money?
#
And martial sports must have told them or star sports must have told them where to exactly
#
to go and put what their demands are.
#
And they would have said, okay, we've changed it.
#
So if you really follow the small print, you'll realize that in 2019 or 20, the Kabaddi Federation
#
changed and they awarded the rights of the next Kabaddi league to Sony.
#
Nobody even knows about it, because by that time, every player knew that there's no point
#
They just went to martial, they joined the Kabaddi league and it went on as it did.
#
So the most interesting thing I want to tell you is this year, there was a tender which
#
had actually been taken out by martial sports saying, okay, these are for the media rights,
#
which were finally again acquired by star.
#
But the interesting thing was not that the media rights were spelt out or the PKL was
#
What is interesting is that in that one notice, there was not one mention about the Kabaddi
#
Clearly, they were charting their own path.
#
And I think that's what's going to happen.
#
You know, Nanda knows a little bit about our journey.
#
In volleyball, we had the same thing, the International Volleyball Federation came down
#
for our finals because they thought here in India, which is probably the largest democracy
#
in the world, 1.3 billion people, there's a sport and you actually got a good product.
#
And then all sorts of things happened because people got greedy.
#
But what's happened as a result is we are launching a volleyball league once again.
#
And this time it's without the Federation.
#
And can I tell you Amit, why it's without the Federation?
#
Because people think very practically.
#
So every time you go to a team and say, invest money, they say, okay, fine, we'll invest
#
So when will I make money?
#
You say, okay, you know, sport is a long gestation period, okay.
#
So you say four years, five years, you're going to make money.
#
They said, boss, if this league is successful for the first three years, the Federation
#
tomorrow will get greedy and will throw you guys out and find somebody else, which has
#
happened in badminton, which has happened in wrestling, which has happened in five other
#
So why should I invest money?
#
Because the moment it gets good, the Federation will throw us out because they'll then get
#
So then we discovered that the only way to actually assure people that, you know, your
#
investment is protected is to say, this has nothing to do with the Federation.
#
Because the moment the Federation comes into effect, if people are greedy enough, they'll
#
just turn down and say that, hey, boss, this is make money.
#
I'm sitting out here and I'm not making any money.
#
And here are these teams.
#
And they're very simple things.
#
They look at athletes staying in five-star hotels or four-star hotels with gyms.
#
And they wonder, you know, these are the athletes that we used to give rice and dal too and
#
sambar too for breakfast in the nationals.
#
Why are they staying in five-star hotels?
#
Obviously, there's a lot of money, which means I need that money.
#
So these are the problems that affect Indian sport.
#
And if you don't break free of that, if you don't create a system, and it's not as if
#
it's in the president over the world.
#
I mean, USA basketball has nothing to do with the NBA.
#
The NBA is a group of owners who get together and they play the sport.
#
And in fact, in 92, when the dream team happened, it was a huge negotiation between the NBA
#
And that's exactly how it is in, whether it's American football, a host of other places.
#
The fact of the matter is that if you're not competent to run the federation, at least
#
let private enterprise get a chance.
#
And that doesn't mean that tomorrow, if, for example, the federation starts a league of
#
their own, which is successful, bully for them.
#
And then guys will get two leagues to play with or three leagues to play with.
#
And there's nothing better than that competition.
#
As Matt Ridley said, all of us sort of Matt Ridley's are both our gurus and we all talk
#
about competition and how it develops and it's fantastic.
#
But you need to do that for sport.
#
And that's where I think over the next few years, Indian sport will take the next few
#
So this is eye opening for me.
#
And before I go on to the next question, I want to make a brief point because I thought
#
what you said about power often coming from ambiguity in rules is very wise and applies
#
to a lot more than sport.
#
I mean, if you just look at the Indian constitution, you look at the caveats to free speech, which
#
are there in article 19 and they are vague things like public order, morality, decency,
#
whatever, which can be interpreted by a bureaucrat or a police constable any way he wants.
#
And that ambiguity is a problem.
#
And of course, what lawyers like Nandan perhaps spend their lifetimes doing is just, you know,
#
subclause or subclause dallo, make it as specific as possible.
#
Don't let people mess around.
#
So my next question is kind of a follow up to this.
#
Like Nandan, you spoke about how in Europe and I wasn't aware of this.
#
So please enlighten me that you spoke about how in Europe there is now this distinction
#
being drawn between regulatory and commercial that it's okay for a federation that governs
#
a sport which has through circumstance achieved at monopoly and monopsony.
#
It's okay for them to continue regulating the sport, but as far as a commercial is concerned
#
that that has to be open to competition and competition, of course, is oxygen.
#
I mean, that's where excellence inevitably comes from.
#
And Joy just gave an example of that in the volleyball league, which he's doing and in
#
So is that the future vision of Indian sport in the sense that you have these federations,
#
but they are autonomous, but they are bound by rules and anybody, any entrepreneur can
#
then go in and compete within that space.
#
So tomorrow someone like me can go and say, okay, I'm going to start a handball league
#
or this league or that league.
#
And you know, I function within the rules of the game, but I can do whatever.
#
So number one, is that your vision of Indian sports say 20 years down the line?
#
Are we going to evolve in that direction?
#
And the other sort of orthogonal question, which Joy might have a really good sense of
#
having built the volleyball league is that does it then become a question of building
#
the popularity of a sport because before it's necessarily commercially viable, like if someone
#
was to tell you 10 years ago, you are volleyball darling, get TV pay the natural assumption
#
of someone like me would have been that there aren't viewers for the game and then it becomes
#
a chicken and egg problem.
#
So our entrepreneurs then going in and saying that, you know, we'll just go first and we'll
#
put a good product out there and the viewership will come, is that a model that you see working
#
and then therefore would you say that many of these so-called Olympic sports, which,
#
you know, aren't necessarily super popular today, I mean, we watch Javelin once in four
#
I mean, this is the first time in my life I saw a Javelin event in fact life, can that
#
change because of the efforts of entrepreneurs who go out there and build that market?
#
Excellent point, Amit and I think Joy's volleyball league is really going to be a precursor.
#
It's going to be interesting to see how the legal system responds to this.
#
So historically, most of these leagues have now gone out with private enterprise, but
#
they also always have had to take sanction from the federation and very often that's
#
It is supposed to be payment in lieu of regulatory services, which is essentially integrity services,
#
making sure that the rules are structured properly, sort of having some dispute resolution
#
measures, but very often it's just a check that is given in exchange for being allowed
#
What is going to happen with volleyball is it's a test case.
#
How is the sort of official pyramid of sport and if I may just take a moment to talk about
#
how the pyramid is structured is every sort of federation has an international linkage.
#
So let's say it's the volleyball federation, there's an international volleyball federation
#
which recognizes the Indian one.
#
The Ministry of Sport also recognizes the volleyball federation and there have been
#
changes and derecognition recognition over time, but then that recognition is dependent
#
on that volleyball federation having state federations as their members.
#
The state federations are expected to have district federations and you're supposed
#
to have literally national coverage to be this national sports federation and to comply
#
Now the question is, is everything that you do theoretically safe within this pyramid?
#
Is it truly a monopoly or monopsony or is the power that has been endowed simply a regulatory
#
power to essentially keep trusteeship of the rules of the game because the essential function
#
of this pyramid is that this pyramid is connected to the international sports pyramid.
#
So there has to be a coherence and universality to sport, right, if volleyball in India was
#
played differently from volleyball in Argentina versus Spain versus Brazil, you couldn't have
#
an international tournament because it's sort of disaggregated pieces trying to feed to
#
So there is a principle value and there is a natural monopoly element to this, which
#
is universality of rules and coherence in a sort of a trajectory moving upwards.
#
But that really comes up largely for the Olympic games or multi-sport games.
#
What happens in between?
#
And is everything theoretically from a legal perspective under the pyramid?
#
The answer coming from the law is the answer is no.
#
There is a monopoly and it is not a monopsony, there's a monopoly in creating the rules
#
of the game, enforcing the rules of the game, making sure there's no breach of like integrity,
#
So someone's not destroying and diluting what the game looks like or the way it's played.
#
But beyond that, does it give you the right to run business?
#
That is a right that has been claimed, but it is not a right that theoretically could
#
be asserted under competition law and I mean, Indian competition law is new.
#
It's in a decade or two old, we have a competition commission of India that has done some very
#
interesting cases on BCCI media rights, on Hockey India, there have been multiple federation
#
Very interesting one is on how it dealt with the Athletics Federation of India, which had
#
taken the view that every marathon in India had to be authorized by the Athletics Federation
#
And the CCI actually held no, you do not have the right to prevent someone from holding
#
You can go and send athletes to international events, but your regulatory function and your
#
commercial function are separate.
#
Anyone can pay that fee.
#
If it's a five lakhs, you'll measure the course, you'll make sure that health and safety is
#
taken care of and no sort of match fixing happening, et cetera.
#
But anyone should be able to go and charge.
#
It's governance as a service, but anyone can hold a marathon.
#
Just look at the way the running movement has evolved as a result, right?
#
Imagine if you had to have Athletics Federation approved events all over the country, significant
#
intervention by competition commission.
#
So this is going to be sort of a process of building businesses, building business models.
#
But there before I hand over to Joy, I'd just like to say we've been damaged a little bit
#
by the sort of the Me Too culture of sports leagues.
#
Everyone is, we talked about the 2008 movement moment of the IPL as much as Abhinav Bindra's.
#
That was adopted as a business model that could work everywhere.
#
And I have a problem with that because cricket and franchising made sense because the prototype
#
had already been developed.
#
What you did is franchise for growth.
#
But what every other league has tried to do and I think you alluded to that a little bit
#
earlier is if that sport doesn't exist, can you build a solid franchise system?
#
Franchise system is being used as startup capital rather than expansion capital.
#
And I think there have to be new and innovative models where you are not necessarily just
#
sort of outsourcing risk and building unsustainable models, which break elsewhere as well.
#
And lots of our leagues have been very destructive to the sport.
#
They're seen as very, very sort of visionary and helpful, but very few have made it to
#
And once something does badly, it builds a mentality that this is not sustainable, but
#
it could simply be the business model that you've chosen the wrong way to go about doing
#
things and you've chosen the wrong people to do it with.
#
And I'll just give you an example that I think the IPL was fantastic because of the ability
#
to reach new people, democratize the tools of production, the new selectors.
#
You can market in Kolkata differently from the way you market in Bangalore or Bombay.
#
But many of the other sports were not that.
#
They were saying, come in, give me money for three years.
#
I'll take your money and I'll build a league.
#
I'll build from scratch and I'll build an audience.
#
Now that's not franchising.
#
That is literally investing in something and taking sort of outsourcing of risk, I would
#
On the other hand, you look at the BBL in Australia.
#
Cricket Australia owns the entire BBL, every single team within it.
#
When it's ready and right, it will divest because at that point, that sport needed sort
#
of growth, needed sort of establishment.
#
And when the time is right, you can also bring in private capital.
#
And just to end, when I talked about earlier the importance of governance to bring private
#
capital in, at the same time, the importance of governance, because private capital is
#
going to come in, all the more reason we are going to need that regulatory function of
#
sports bodies to be done excellently.
#
Because the profit motive is great, competition is great, but private enterprise can also
#
be destructive of the sports movement.
#
It leads to things like conflict of interest, the sort of the private sort of profiteering
#
and you have someone in the body also with an interest in that profiteering.
#
If you do not build the governance framework, private capital can damage as much as it can
#
support the growth of sport.
#
No, no, I have a lot to say and a lot of which Nandan may have discussed over so many, so
#
But first and foremost, what happens is that one of the problems is firstly, when you start
#
a sport, you turn around and say, okay, this is an IPA, let's make a league, okay.
#
Let me give you some basic issues.
#
One is that every game is not good for a league, okay.
#
Individual sports is not easy to build a league in.
#
And I'll give you a typical case.
#
In the 70s, there was something called World Team Tennis in the United States of America.
#
John McEnroe was playing for Los Angeles, Jimmy Connors was playing for New York, Bjorn
#
Bogg was playing for Washington.
#
Because people were watching Bogg versus Connors or Bogg versus McEnroe, Connors versus McEnroe.
#
They were never watching Washington versus New York or LA or any such country.
#
The problem is individual sport does not lend itself to leagues in the same way as team
#
sports too, number one.
#
Number two, there's some games which are more television-friendly, others less so.
#
Cricket is a great television-friendly game, hockey is not.
#
So you'll ask the ball is equally small.
#
But remember, when you play cricket, you have 15 seconds of live action, okay.
#
The bowler goes in, bowls the ball, the batsman hits the ball.
#
And then you have a minute of replays.
#
Cricket is essentially a game of replays.
#
If you think about it, cricket is a game of four to five replays.
#
It's the ratio of live action to replay is about one is to five, okay.
#
Hockey is exactly the opposite.
#
You barely have time to show a replay because the action is so fast.
#
Maybe you'll get in the replay of a penalty corner or two, but during a football game
#
or a hockey game, it's very difficult to get in replays.
#
Now here, football, the ball is large enough.
#
You can follow the action.
#
So football, volleyball, basketball, easy games to create.
#
The second thing is, do games have breaks?
#
So football is, in fact, one of the tougher games because you don't have that many breaks
#
to put in ads, whereas cricket is terrific for ads because in every over, you have a
#
So all these are factors that come into A, that you can make your sport viable or not.
#
Is it an individual sport?
#
Is it television-friendly?
#
For example, I love playing table tennis.
#
I actually played at a fairly decent level in college as well.
#
But table tennis is not a sport I can watch.
#
I watched tennis, which I've never played in my life, but table tennis is not a sport
#
I can watch simply because the mechanics of the game and how it looks on the table.
#
So those are things that you need to look at.
#
So everything cannot be a league.
#
Secondly, a lot of things are suited by just a tournament.
#
What you call a league can just be a terrific tournament and you can make it.
#
And that's what it used to be.
#
So when you didn't have an Indian Soccer League before, but you used to have the Durand Cup,
#
the Borderline Cup, the DCM Cup.
#
You had the Rovers Cup.
#
So Bombay had the Rovers, DCM in Delhi.
#
The Durand used to happen all over the place, mostly in Delhi.
#
The IFA Shield used to happen in Calcutta.
#
That's how it used to operate.
#
So a good tournament also makes sense because you're attracting teams, you're attracting
#
And some cases, you look at a sport and you say, you know what?
#
This needs a tournament.
#
This doesn't need a league because everything does not need to be an IPL.
#
The next thing is, how do I actually benchmark the price of the players?
#
And this is the biggest problem.
#
If I turn on benchmark and say that, you know what?
#
If an IPL player gets $100,000, the average IPL player gets $100,000.
#
My league players need to get $25,000.
#
That's totally the wrong way to look at it.
#
Because is your league going to generate that cash, if not now in three years time?
#
If it's not, pay them the amount of money you think they'll generate in three years
#
Because otherwise, your league will never have a path to profitability.
#
And that's a big, big, big issue with a lot of leagues.
#
I mean, badminton, the kind of money the players are being paid, I'm looking at it and saying,
#
can they sustain this league?
#
It turns out they can't.
#
We don't have a badminton league anymore.
#
At this point in time, we're talking about Indian sport and all that.
#
There's an Indian Premier League.
#
There's I-League, which is also football.
#
There may be volleyball, which we're doing at the end of the year.
#
Name one other league which is excellent.
#
And that's a fact of it.
#
Wrestling has gone under.
#
Badminton has gone under.
#
Handball has not started.
#
Cocoa, we think, will start.
#
Nobody knows whether it'll ever start or not.
#
Because all of these are over-promised, under-delivered.
#
And OK, the single most important thing when you're looking for a league is the ownership.
#
So if you have a guy who's the owner, who's turning around and said, boss, you mean Abhishek
#
Bachchan has a team, and I'm going to sit beside him when the picture's taken?
#
He's going to be there for one or two years till the novelty of sitting beside Abhishek
#
After that, the three or four crores he's losing here no longer makes sense.
#
So these are all the barriers, the practical barriers that come into trying to make a league
#
and why a lot of our leagues have gone bottoms up, primarily because a lot of these things
#
probably didn't deserve to be leagues in the first place and were leagues just simply because
#
it was easy to explain to people that the IPL model or like the IPL, we have our league.
#
So that's one of the things or lessons we've got to learn in Indian sport to say, OK, what
#
is it that we make a league?
#
What is it that we make a tournament?
#
What is it that's best served by doing something completely else?
#
And all these are, mind you, I believe that even in archery, you can have an activity
#
which is financially rewarding, makes sense to athletes, and works.
#
But you have to create that framework based on where the game is and what you can get
#
And that's what we're not doing nowadays very well.
#
Yeah, all great points I'm learning so much during this conversation just to give my thoughts
#
One, I take your point, Nandan, that these are not necessarily monopsonies, though one
#
thinks of it as a monopsony because when the BCCI shut down the ICL essentially by threatening
#
the players who played it that you can't play for your countries again, they were effectively
#
behaving as a monopsony and they had the market power to do so because they had a monopoly
#
And I would go further by saying that, yeah, by your point that they're not monopsonies
#
necessarily, they're not even necessarily monopolies in terms of setting the rules.
#
That's a way it's been normalized.
#
We think of it like that.
#
But if you look at what happens to new sports, for example, recently, I went into this rabbit
#
hole where I was watching a lot of Tetris World Championships and so on.
#
And there are sort of different federations which have different kinds of world championships.
#
One is the newest kind of Tetris, which is very funky and colorful and sound effects
#
The other is a classic console Tetris, where I think recently the previous champion 17
#
year old Joseph Salie lost to the 13 year old new champion whose name is dog.
#
I mean, he calls himself dog and all these are happening online.
#
Similarly, something new like poker, like I recently represented India in a particular
#
form of poker called match poker.
#
We won the Asian Championships.
#
And it's not like there is one federation.
#
The federation which created this kind of poker was something called the International
#
Federation of Match Poker and match poker is not poker, which is why I kind of came
#
out of I was a poker player for five years, retired, wasn't for me.
#
The lifestyle wasn't worth it, even though the money was decent.
#
But I came out of this because I thought, oh, new format, let me optimize for it.
#
And we won the Indian version of the IPL a couple of times.
#
And then we played this.
#
But the point is, you have multiple competing leagues there and you have multiple systems
#
So not just multiple forms of the game like No Limit Holdem or Pot Limit Omaha, but you
#
also have different sort of rules of the game, like this match poker looks like Holdem,
#
but it's like not like it at all.
#
All the imperatives are completely different.
#
So that sort of shines a light that there are possibilities that even when it comes
#
to setting the rules, you can possibly go beyond maybe not in some legacy sports because
#
everything is so incredibly ossified and all of that.
#
But maybe there's way past that and at least thank God there's no, you know, a federation
#
of podcasting, for example, run by the Indian government because then, you know, the scene
#
and the unseen simply would not exist.
#
As far as Joy, what you said about all these, both of you mentioned how these different
#
people are trying different things and they don't make any sense.
#
And I completely agree with that as well.
#
You know, I think what happened was the IPL get successful, all these copycat guys come
#
similar to, you know, Uber become successful of 50 copycat Ubers come up and so on.
#
And I think you also have to look at what a sport is at the grassroots.
#
Like somebody said to me last year that, hey, why shouldn't the IPL become eventually a
#
system like the English Premier League, where you have different leagues, you have the championship
#
league one and you have relegations and all that.
#
And I said, listen, that's not possible.
#
That's not possible because the ecosystem doesn't exist.
#
In England, you have all of these, this rich ecosystem of so many football clubs have been
#
playing for over a century and you actually have that sort of structured way and all those
#
hundreds of clubs in India.
#
The IPL was an artificial creation.
#
It worked because there was a craze for the game.
#
But if you want to kind of take it deeper, I'm not sure it would really work in that
#
But all these are sort of rambles.
#
And we've spoken about a lot of big meta level questions in this first part of the podcast.
#
After we come back from the commercial break, we are about to take, I actually want to get
#
down and dirty and talk about Indian sport per se, how it has evolved, what you guys
#
have done, what your experiences are and where it's going.
#
And we get down to specific, some also very intrigued in some of the things you were saying
#
Nandan about, you know, fencing, how it suddenly came of age or, you know, how the hockey federation
#
pulled itself together.
#
So all of that after a quick break.
#
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Welcome back to the scene in the unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Joy Bhattacharya and Nandan Kamath, both of whom have done so much amazing
#
work within Indian sport and have such great insights on what is happening in Indian sport.
#
You know, let's now begin talking about Indian sport, but specifically for a moment.
#
Let's first talk about the history of Indian sport.
#
We've already discussed about how we weren't a sporting nation for a large period of time.
#
And there are many reasons one can speculate upon that poverty being one we didn't mention
#
because you know, hey, who's got the leisure time to actually play sport.
#
But looking back on it, it seems that a lot of the sports that we became good at our essentially
#
a colonial bequest, like whether it's cricket or badminton, or we had world champions in
#
like billiards and all at one particular point in time, I remember when I was growing up,
#
it would seem that these were colonial bequest, which could essentially be played by the anglicized
#
And then gradually that started changing.
#
And now of course, the landscape is very different.
#
One narrative, of course, is that liberalization opened it up and there was this burgeoning
#
So you had all your cricket stars, you know, coming out of smaller towns, like Dhoni and
#
Sehwag and whatever instead of from specific places, like I did an episode with the historian
#
Ram Guha, where he was speaking about his time in the Hindu college in Delhi in the
#
And it seems the other Indian cricket team was from his college only, you know, so you
#
had a very small pool of elite anglicized elite people from whom you're drawing all
#
of your talent and that kind of change.
#
So take me through a bit of Indian sporting history, did we have a sporting history before
#
colonialism or I mean, do we know anything about that?
#
How has sport in India evolved through the decades after independence and perhaps after
#
What do you think are the kind of key moments?
#
Give me a sense of that direction and that drift.
#
Okay, I'll just go first, because I used to do this professionally for I take classes
#
in IIM, Calcutta and Micah.
#
So this is one of the things that you know, not classes, guest lectures, but this is one
#
of the things that I always want to do because see the one question all of us come and you
#
know, all of us have heard this over the last 30 years is that if India is 1 billion people,
#
why don't we win more medals?
#
The only way the question hasn't changed is from 1 billion, we've gone to 1.3 billion
#
and the question has remained the same.
#
I mean, I hope, you know, in the last five years, the question has changed a little bit
#
thanks to kind of stuff that Nandan and his team are doing.
#
But see, if you look at it, I mean, forget about, you know, Pachisi and, you know, all
#
the ancient Indian sports, Cocoa, Pachisi, Cocoa was apparently played with chariots
#
And there's a lot of history.
#
But really, Indian sport, as we know, it started with the Brits.
#
And they just thought that it's a better idea that we sort of throw javelins and, you know,
#
kick footballs and hockey sticks, use hockey sticks other than, you know, basically go
#
And if you look at it very carefully, you will see that almost every sport, the first
#
tournament is in the UK because Brits are very good at not so good at playing a sport
#
created in bending sports.
#
So the first tournament is in the UK and the second tournament is in India.
#
So the first golf course in the world is, of course, the St Andrews golf course in Scotland.
#
The next one is the RCJC, which is the Royal Calcutta Golf Club in Calcutta.
#
The first major tournament, international football tournament is the FA Cup.
#
And the second is the Durand Cup, which is in India, which is originally played in Shimla.
#
So for them, the colonial legacy is a great thing.
#
You keep your, you know, you keep your Brits in India happy.
#
You keep your soldiers happy.
#
You keep even the local populace happy because you know what, I'd rather be beaten in a football
#
game in 1911 by Mohun Bagan and for people to celebrate rather than have Bengalis, irate
#
Bengalis throw bombs at me.
#
And that's the difference.
#
So the Brits did a very good job of it, which also meant that the sports that they were
#
interested in were the sports that we really inherited, which is really lots of football,
#
some amount of cricket, some amount of hockey.
#
That's what we inherited.
#
And they started putting together tournaments.
#
So they had this whole tournaments of, you know, the pentangular there, you know, it's
#
a ghastly thought today, but you know, you're playing against religions, you know, Europeans
#
playing against Parsis, playing against Hindus, playing against Muslims, playing against others,
#
which is, you know, all other religions which are there and, you know, for example, Vijaya
#
Hazare is an Indian Christian, so he plays for others because he can't play for Europeans
#
and all these things happen.
#
But basically what happens is the British are running sport in India.
#
Now the big story is what happens in 1947.
#
So 47 happens, the Brits leave India.
#
Now you can understand the Brits have, you know, depleted our treasury and all our reserves
#
You know, they've had a lot of time, 190 odd years, 1757 to 1947 to do what they do.
#
Who is left who has the money and time to do anything other than roti kapra makhan, which
#
is what the country is looking to do because, you know, we are a very poor nation struggling
#
The only people who had the time were the Maharajas and the Rajas.
#
So if you look around at that time, you know, half our trophies, whether it's a Durand,
#
whether it's, you know, the Patiala, the Ranji Trophy, which is presented with the Maharaja
#
all these are dominated by the Maharajas because they are the only people who have the time
#
and the leisure to do these stuff.
#
In fact, if you look at it, we shot for a long time, you know, Karni Singh and all these
#
guys shot for a long time.
#
We did well at polo because hell, these are games at Maharajas.
#
So 1956 we win the world polo tournament because, you know, Maharajas do well at that.
#
We do well at billiards because, you know, these are the kind of games the Brits play.
#
So for a long time this happened and then, you know, 60s, 70s, your bureaucrats and everyone's
#
Then is the next step where Privy Purse happens.
#
And once the Privy Purse happens, immediately these guys don't no longer have the money.
#
Look, this is a very broad stroke narrative.
#
Secondly, the Indian bureaucracy is also saying that, you know, we want the power.
#
And remember, in the 70s, possibly the kind of money you would get for, for example, going
#
$20 is what you used to get it for an exchange.
#
So going for a foreign trip abroad was a huge thing.
#
So the next people who took over this thing were the politicians and the bureaucrats because
#
hey, sport was a way we could send relatives abroad, where you could go abroad, where you
#
could pick people and a lot of them.
#
I'm not saying they were not good people who were there, but a lot of these places, if
#
you see the Indian sporting establishment, the bureaucracy started dominating it.
#
And if you see people like Vijay Kumar Malhotra, Vijay Kumar Malhotra joined the Indian Archery
#
Federation in the 70s when Mrs. Gandhi was in power and cut to 2018 and her grandson
#
is competing for a place and trying to establish his political position.
#
And he was still in power.
#
I mean, he just, he was there for the next 47, 48 years and that's true of so many Indian
#
And this is cuts across party lines, whether I want to talk about Jagdish Taitil or Sajjan
#
Kumar, all these people, federations were a way of keeping relatives happy, of going
#
for foreign visits and of doing all that.
#
And I have to say that the really professional Indian sports manager really is a product
#
of 2005, 6, 7, 8, up to and including that first IPL, people like Nandan, people like
#
even Sundar Raman, entering Indian sport and saying, okay, we're going to look at it professionally.
#
So there have been places before, but I think those were inflection points, 2008, the Privy
#
Purse, independence before that, that's basically how I look at it.
#
So this is my broad broad stroke.
#
I know Nandan will know far more detail and give you a far better idea, but broadly these
#
are the ways you can divide it up.
#
I think that was excellently put.
#
I just found a little bit of interest in some of the reading I've done around early stage
#
And for that matter, many of these other sports, I know it's a term quite used quite differently
#
now, but the concept of social distancing was quite popular at the time.
#
And sport was seen as a way of socially distancing yourself from sort of the plebeians to show
#
that you were anglicized and sort of with it and cool for the time.
#
So a lot of the sports are around that and then that whole notion of privilege and sport.
#
And obviously so much of our infrastructure even today in many of these sports like golf
#
are actually locked up behind members clubs, there aren't public golf courses in India.
#
So much of that is still sort of privilege based access to even playing the sport, forget
#
about progressing at the sport.
#
And there is very much a sort of a class system which is not fully dissipated.
#
I think one of the great joys and successes is to see even the Indian cricket team and
#
how it has got democratized and you call it the Dhoni effect, you call it whatever else.
#
But today, I think anyone who's good has a way in, there are various reasons for that.
#
But you also see a lot of our other sports and one of the things that becomes very clear
#
is that sport is not just about this sort of actualization and self actualization.
#
But for many, many of our athletes, it is simply a matter of livelihood.
#
Solution to that has been sort of it moved from patronage and needing patronage of the
#
I mean, our early Olympic movement was supported by the Tatas, just sort of collecting money
#
Lots of things have happened.
#
But when we went to sort of independent India, we used a slightly different model.
#
So if you look at the big models of the world, you look at the US, it's college sport that
#
drives sort of really top class sport.
#
And actually, I was amazed with a couple of things in just my personal journey.
#
So I went to the UK, I went to Oxford as a graduate student.
#
So I'd finished at a national law school.
#
I played a pretty high level of cricket in India.
#
And I go and turn up at my college, there are 39 colleges at Oxford.
#
Every single one of them had either equal or better facilities than I had used as a
#
So state level cricketers, we got four or five games on turf, all the rest was on matting.
#
We barely got to play in the nets, maybe a few days before the tournament, pretty sort
#
I played that level of cricket, I'd never had a physio to work with.
#
What sort of physical training involved is, okay, the nets are starting in sort of 20
#
minutes, run 10 rounds of Chennai Swami Stadium, and that's your warm up.
#
Few stretches seemed like a big deal.
#
I mean, you talk to some of the Indian cricketers who played in the early 2000s, they did not
#
have a legitimate physiotherapist.
#
Like anything happened, what you would get is a doctor popping crocin for you.
#
Whatever happened, muscle pain, injury, muscle pull, it was a crocin.
#
It was only sort of the Andrew Lepers and others who come in and change sports science
#
But what I'm getting back to is sort of that notion of access to infrastructure.
#
If a college and 39 colleges have the equivalent of what maybe 35 states have in India, and
#
that's in one little town, and then you go to the U.S. and you look at college sport
#
and the craziness of college sport and NCAA football.
#
And it's only recently, in fact, in the last few months that that amateurism has been sort
#
of diluted, sort of athletes in the U.S. today cannot be paid zero while college programs
#
make millions and millions and coaches make millions.
#
There's a recent case on name, image, and likeness and the right to be paid for that.
#
But they still built an entire culture around an identity which was not necessarily national.
#
And I think Ram Guha talks a lot about this, of needing to be parochial for sport.
#
But you can find your own parochialisms and the U.S. found it through colleges.
#
Europe found it through clubs.
#
So there's a massive club system.
#
I mean, you look again at Holland.
#
I think Amsterdam has more hockey pitches or at least had more hockey pitches than all
#
All of them run by clubs.
#
We are, again, very state driven.
#
What we did is we made sure that every decent athlete got a government job.
#
So there was actually a mandate that the public sector units, many of them have surpluses.
#
They were forced to employ our athletes.
#
That had an element of security.
#
And like I've said in sort of my piece earlier, and you talked about it, intermediate rewards.
#
But it's also where lots of ambitions went to die.
#
So it was the terminal result and reward that people wanted, a government job was secure.
#
That's where your sort of aspiration ended because that was seen as the end goal.
#
So for many years, we ran on sort of the public sector support.
#
I mean, private sector was nowhere.
#
And it's only in these 2000s that the IPL comes in.
#
I sort of have my journey, go and study the UK and the US.
#
I worked for three years at a law firm.
#
I come back to India wanting to do something meaningful with my skills.
#
I'm a lawyer, but deeply interested in sport.
#
And I go around talking to people.
#
People I've played with, other people doing great things in sport.
#
And when I ask them, which lawyer do you use, they just give me this quizzical look.
#
What do you mean lawyer?
#
I've never dealt with a lawyer.
#
And that's the professionalism that Joy talks about as well.
#
And for me, the game changed in 2008 when IMG comes in to the IPL contracts, sponsorship
#
contracts, franchise agreement.
#
That IPL franchise agreement has been copied, I think, 25 different times.
#
And I keep joking with the IMG lawyers who I know quite well.
#
You have lawyered for all of Indian sport with that one contract.
#
They've been massacred, but they still have some of the words.
#
I've seen some of the other leagues where the word IPL still appears in the contract.
#
But what you saw there was a gradual professionalization and then a sudden professionalization.
#
So nothing happened for many years.
#
But 2008, you suddenly started seeing many, many more people coming in, even if only seasonally
#
So you had many doers, very few heads and very few people thinking sport.
#
But suddenly you saw that because the money attracted enough professionals to sport.
#
And then you had the IPL for three months, but then the other people had another nine
#
months to do something else with.
#
So a lot of the people who started the other leagues were the product of the IPL.
#
They worked within a franchise.
#
It's not a 12-month league.
#
So you have other things to do.
#
You start doing other things.
#
And to me, that's where a lot of the democratization, not just from structure, but just from the
#
market started playing out.
#
People brought physios in, people brought foreign coaches in.
#
Indian coaches got to work very closely.
#
But most importantly of all, I think that divide between foreigner and Indian in the
#
players' minds dissipated and disappeared.
#
Cricket gets a lot of flak for what it does for other sports.
#
You don't hear that language anymore.
#
I think people appreciate what Indian cricket has done for other sports in many ways.
#
I mean, you just watch the sort of performance of India in Australia.
#
That was a transformative series, not just for cricket, but for Indian sport.
#
Are you telling me the Indian girls who played that quarterfinal against Australia wouldn't
#
have had that in their minds?
#
So many battles are not fought by necessarily the same athletes, but the battles of breaking
#
down competition, believing what is possible, is sort of a nationwide team.
#
It's not broken by sport.
#
And Abhinav Bindra in shooting, you couldn't have a more different sport than javelin.
#
And still you see Neeraj Chopra sort of attributing some element of his mindset and his mind game
#
to the fact that Abhinav Bindra went 13 years before him.
#
So my next question comes out of sort of an aside that sprung to my mind where you spoke
#
about the lack of infrastructure.
#
Like I'm just thinking of chess, for example, when Anand was coming up in the late eighties
#
as a really promising young adolescent and then young teenage player, he obviously ran
#
into the Soviet system and the Soviet system had incredible pedagogy.
#
Like there is this story about how Anand would be figuring out things over the board, concretely
#
calculating and all that at the age of 17 or 18.
#
And all of those heuristics had been taught to, you know, his Soviet opponents when they
#
were like eight years old or nine years old.
#
So it was second nature to them.
#
And it wasn't second nature to him.
#
And he had to battle that.
#
And that is such an enormous achievement, getting to the top despite that, that I often
#
speak about, you know, what Anand did was really equal to winning a Formula One race
#
That's effectively what he did when you consider the infrastructural disadvantages.
#
Now what you see in modern times is that that's leveled out because of the internet and because
#
of this incredibly powerful pedagogical software in the sense that for the last 15 years or
#
so computers have been much better than humans and they play a huge role in pedagogy where,
#
you know, people can play hundreds of thousands of games in a year and just learn so much,
#
use computers for analysis.
#
And that's kind of changed everything.
#
So now here is a big question that comes up about chess.
#
And I'll tell you why I bring it up and in the context of other sports, which is that
#
on the one hand, it's true that Anand becoming successful led to a chess boom in India, like
#
In fact, there was a gap about who the next grandmaster would be.
#
It was like Thipsae versus Barua.
#
And that was the thing.
#
And eventually they both got there.
#
And today they're like a dime a dozen.
#
I think last year the squares on a chessboard were covered.
#
We reached 64 and then we crossed 64 and they're a dime a dozen.
#
So on the one hand, there can be a narrative that Anand led to a chess boom, which is definitely
#
On the other hand, there is a narrative that it's this democratization of technology and
#
pedagogy and infrastructure as it were, which led to that chess boom and Anand to some extent,
#
Now, this leads me to think about what historians call the great man theory of history, where
#
there are these severe disagreements between people about whether history is shaped by
#
great men or occasionally women, but we know how sexist history has generally been in these
#
matters that you only have great men, but is shaped by great men.
#
And there's another view that says that there are certain tides and processes through history
#
and we shouldn't ascribe too much credit to individuals.
#
Now, when I think on Indian sport, it seems to me that there are many inflection points
#
which tie into the great man theory or the great moment theory, like for Indian cricket,
#
you can say 1983 made a big difference, you know, or you could say the IPL made a big
#
And I do believe both of those certainly made a difference for the great man theory.
#
You spoke about, you know, how Bindra's gold medal made a great difference in terms of
#
self-belief and the perceptions that people had towards the sport.
#
Equally, you know, you can look at Gopichand.
#
If Gopichand did not exist, would badminton be where it is today?
#
And I think there's an argument there to be made that, no, perhaps it would not.
#
Even with say, why do so many of our women wrestlers from Haryana do well?
#
And that has to do with the happenstance of, you know, in the late seventies, great coach
#
Chandigarh Ram, who doesn't have any sons, gets the news that the Olympics is now going
#
to open up wrestling to women.
#
So he trains his daughters and one of his assistant coaches is Mahavir Singh Fogat.
#
And he does the same thing.
#
And you know, and that ecosystem suddenly comes up.
#
So what is sort of your take on this, on the importance of these sort of inflection points?
#
And would it be the case that Indian sport is now reaching a stage of maturity where
#
we don't need these anymore, where we are progressing along a certain route?
#
You know, we are not reliant on individual inspirational figures or individual people
#
like Gopi Chand to set up something, but that there is a broader movement that has now begun
#
and that has a momentum of its own.
#
And I'm again, as I said, all this is very much a matter of debate.
#
I feel that sport more than anything else requires heroes.
#
It requires heroes and heroines.
#
I mean, I use it in a completely non-sexual sense more than anything else, because the
#
inspirational factor cannot come there.
#
And I'll take an example, which is not mentioned by any of you, which is to do with football.
#
I mean, Northeast football, OK, you have T. Ao, who is 1948.
#
He's the captain of the 1948 Olympic team, very respected man, plays in Calcutta football.
#
You have a couple of people in the 80s, Pem Dorji plays in the 80s.
#
But it's Bai Chung Bhutia who opens the tap to the Northeast.
#
And I'll take you through that if you look at 93, 94, Bai Chung Bhutia comes, starts
#
playing for East Bengal, starts playing soccer, and suddenly the entire Northeast is open.
#
And then within the next 7, 8, 10 years, you'll find the teams dominated, men's teams, women's
#
teams dominated by the Northeast.
#
And I think because sport is all about dreaming, I feel individuals play a far bigger factor
#
It's easy for you to turn on and say that if it hadn't been Abhinav Bindra, somebody
#
else would have done it.
#
I don't believe that's necessarily true.
#
The unique set of circumstances that made Abhinav Bindra champion are probably difficult
#
to replicate because he was two, three things.
#
He had the money, he had the means, but he also had that complete perfectionist place.
#
I mean, think about a fact about thinking about that, you know, I'm going to play in
#
an auditorium, which is very large.
#
So instead of shooting in my shooting gallery, which is small, I need to shoot in a large
#
place just to get used to that hall I'll be in Beijing.
#
That's the kind of detailing that an insane guy does.
#
And I'm sorry that I, you know, it's easy to turn on and say that history will, you
#
know, somebody else like Abhinav Bindra would have turned up, but the odds are against it.
#
And that's why, again, you look at history, you look at 1983.
#
Had India not won in 83, would the cricket have been the same?
#
Well, I can tell you one thing, you know, for all recorded history there is, we certainly
#
wouldn't have bid for the World Cup in 1987.
#
Had we not won in 83, all of them were planning, they thought they'd lose and they were going
#
for a holiday to the US after that.
#
Had that happened, would the 1987 World Cup happen in India?
#
And I don't think it would have.
#
So I feel that, you know, this great man theory or great woman theory, I mean, there's no
#
thing involved in that.
#
I think for sport, you need those kind of lucky breaks, you need those kind of once
#
in a generation breaks.
#
And I'd be really interested in hearing what Nandan has to say about that.
#
I mean, I largely agree and a lot of my work has been related to that is to create that
#
one example, which what we call changes the script.
#
And that's a hashtag we use quite often, which is, we came in 2006-7, I just found so much
#
cynicism about Indian sport.
#
It was so different from the conversation we've just had around the Tokyo games, where
#
there was disappointment coming from expectation.
#
Earlier, it was disappointment coming from just sort of, we're not good enough and this
#
And I just wanted to get out of that cynicism and start doing something.
#
I was a lawyer, but I had a great interest in sport.
#
So I just said, now, can we create new path breakers?
#
So I believe, okay, I can accept we don't have a sports culture.
#
How am I going to change people's mindsets?
#
I'm not going to tell them, hey, you don't know what you're doing.
#
You don't think like me and we're good at sport, but what can I do?
#
I can create new examples.
#
I can present new evidence and allow people to consider that evidence and see, am I willing
#
And that takes time, right?
#
So what we did is working with, in some sense, the unusual and the unexpected.
#
So looking at sports which had not been supported, looking at disciplines which may not have
#
So looking at diversity, not for its own sake, but for its ability to create that trailblazer
#
I mean, these are sort of a little bit hyperbolic, but that person who creates the first example,
#
and I'll reconnect that to my story of being that person asked, do you want to be a lawyer
#
or do you want to be a cricketer?
#
Ask that question by the National Law School director, I might still choose to be a lawyer.
#
But has that ratio changed?
#
I mean, for me, it was at 595.
#
How do I get that ratio to change?
#
How do I get people, key stakeholders, and by that, the most key stakeholder is actually
#
the parent of the sports child.
#
I think we underestimate the importance of what is going on in the parent's head and
#
the conversation the parent has with the child.
#
Very rarely does a child decide what sport they play.
#
Very often it's the parent who initiates, the child might sort of click.
#
But the motivation is very often parental motivation.
#
And you look at the great Indian athletes, so many of them have super motivated and very
#
often sporting parents who go to extremes.
#
And it's something worth talking about is how difficult it is to be the parent of a
#
talented sports child today.
#
But the reality is, if we can change that conversation, the one that the child has with
#
the parent, and to me, those single people help change that conversation.
#
If a young person says, hey, I want to pursue fencing, what is the natural question a parent
#
The parent is going to ask, show me one person who has made a living out of fencing.
#
Now India has that answer.
#
And I think that in my belief, you can change perceptions one athlete at a time, and you
#
are not going to go and say, hey, now change your perception that we can have an Indian
#
The performance speaks for itself.
#
And that's the beauty of the Olympics.
#
We don't need to say she's a good fencer.
#
She's gone out, done what she needs to do.
#
The next person aspiring to be a fencer, or for that matter, not even in sport, aspiring
#
to do something that has not been done before, it is a conversation changer.
#
So I do believe and I agree with Joy that one athlete can change trajectories.
#
And there's this notion of path dependency as well, the path that is tread.
#
The one thing I will add to that is there can be also confluences of events where that
#
great athlete comes along with something else.
#
And I think we saw the sort of the airwaves and the privatization of the airwaves come
#
with Tendulkar as well.
#
And that's a double whammy, competition in distribution, but also this great athlete
#
We saw the 2007 World Cup coming with the IPL.
#
The IPL without the 2007 T20 World Cup win would have been nothing, I mean, not nothing,
#
but it gave it its sort of fumes, the Yuvraj Singh 6.6s.
#
So there can be groupings of events to me that become this catalyzing effect which,
#
if one of them happened alone, may not have been adequate.
#
So that's sort of the addition I would make to one person can change it, but there can
#
be something else that gives it its fuel.
#
So timing can bring fortune, timing can bring confluence.
#
No, I agree with both of you entirely.
#
And I think individual dreamers like that can have that kind of impact.
#
But I think what a sports administrator really has to do is find a way to enable the dreamers
#
and to enable the dreaming and to make it seem practical.
#
Before I move on to my next question, Nandan, I didn't at all finish that whole personal
#
narrative of what your arc was like, which always interests me a lot.
#
So let's quickly finish that arc that you're given that choice when you get into law school,
#
you get your law degree, you go to Oxford on a road scholarship, whereas you pointed
#
out every single college had better sporting infrastructure than your state.
#
And then you go to Harvard Law School, and then you work three years abroad.
#
And then you say, I'm not going to do this, I'm going to come back to India and do something
#
That seems so baffling and incredible to me.
#
So tell me about that, tell me about, you know, how could you make that choice?
#
Did you have specifics in mind that I will do ABC, or were you like that, no, I'm going
#
to go and figure it out and I want to do something.
#
So I mean, I'd done what I needed to do.
#
I just felt I'd spent my 20s.
#
I mean, I got so much privilege, so many opportunities, choose the place I wanted to study and I'd
#
got in, I'd got these chances.
#
And I'd given myself essentially six years, I'd said, I'm going to study for three years
#
work for three years, and I need to I need to be back.
#
I mean, call me whatever it is, I could call me patriotic, you could call me a homebody.
#
I just wanted to be home and wanted to start figuring out where I can make a contribution
#
And in some sense, sport just found me again.
#
I wanted to do sport, but it just the things around me started, I'd done a lot by then
#
a lot of work on internet law, technology law, intellectual property, all of which started
#
becoming extremely useful in my sports law practice.
#
I wanted to do sports law, but it didn't automatically come through.
#
Like I said, the IPL happens, lots of the people I played cricket with come back to
#
me and ask me legal questions.
#
So in some sense, sport reclaimed me and I think that that original love just was never
#
lost and it attracted me back in a way that I really can't explain.
#
But I sort of dealt with each opportunity as it came, first started trying to work with
#
athletes, represent them, but then move to a much more sort of use my skills well, and
#
my skills were law and backed into working in sports law, sports regulation, sports governance,
#
but also figuring out how to buffer that there wasn't a huge amount of work to do.
#
So I also continued working on technology law, internet law, which were my specialties,
#
but then also started the foundation with a couple of other colleagues, in fact from
#
my same school, where we really felt we had to sort of stop being so cynical, not be the
#
people who are sitting there cursing the television and say, okay, I mean, we may not be experts,
#
we don't have the money, we don't have the expertise, but what we do have is intent and
#
desire and just a love for sport, which should count for something, sort of incorporated
#
a nonprofit, a trust, Go Sports Foundation is what it ended up becoming.
#
For years, it was extremely difficult.
#
I mean, there's so much cynicism, not just in people watching, but we ask someone for
#
money and they say, like, why are you wasting your time?
#
I mean, people closest to me would have thought of me as and did think of me as extremely
#
It sounds like an absurd thing to do, like you're given up a law firm career, the sort
#
of the most structured profession you can think of in the US, the most disciplined,
#
you get want something done, it gets done in five minutes or 10 minutes.
#
You don't send an email out without reading it five times to make sure there's every full
#
stop and comma and come into the disorganized world of Indian sport.
#
But there's something attracted me to it.
#
And I think looking back, a lot of it is what sport gave me for identity, for confidence,
#
for who I became, and also the skills that it gave me to navigate the world and life.
#
Even my educational opportunities, I saw everything as something that could be gamified, something
#
that you could figure out the rules, play by the rules, do well.
#
It gave me a lot of the tools to navigate the world.
#
And I started asking the broader questions of if it made some difference to me, can I
#
make it count similarly for other people?
#
And I wouldn't call any of the things I'd gone through as scars, they were just more
#
observations of my own sort of being self-critical of the life I'd lived.
#
I just felt from those learnings, can something positive emerge?
#
And having had those opportunities, time to flip it and do something meaningful that counts
#
And using sport as a tool, which I thought was heavily underdone in our country, sport
#
as a tool, not just for winning an identity and other things, but just sport as a tool
#
for living a better life at an individual level.
#
And in some sense, crafting a better society, a place where all of us sort of pursue excellence,
#
work on friendship, work on respect, and just the spirit of Olympism.
#
Looking back now, I hear all these words, but I think they were just intrinsic, that
#
motivation to work on these projects for that sake was just extremely intrinsic.
#
And just a lived experience, which I wanted to share in some sense.
#
So it wasn't any great altruism.
#
I was just trying to find what I thought was a life worth living and finding in some sense,
#
the joy in sharing what I found as meaningful.
#
So before I get to the specifics of what your foundation does, which I'm very keen to learn
#
more about, a final broad question.
#
You mentioned the little kid who goes to his mom and says, hey, I want to do fencing.
#
And the mom says, but who is there who has been successful?
#
And now that kid can point to someone.
#
But most of the time, if a kid was to come to me, I would say that, yeah, there is someone,
#
but that is survivorship bias.
#
There's no ecosystem here.
#
I don't see any league.
#
It's the scene and the unseen, right?
#
The scene is that one kid who makes it, the unseen is the many, many other countless kids
#
And therefore, there is an opportunity cost for them for pursuing that.
#
So I would say, no, he should become like Nandan, law him.
#
And this is not something you would say to someone in cricket necessarily, because there
#
is that rich ecosystem.
#
Now it strikes me that when you set out to do whatever you do, your first goal would
#
obviously be that, OK, let us support the athletes who are there, who are the talented
#
kids in whatever sports, let's support them.
#
Your second goal down the road, though, has to be to build an ecosystem.
#
So therefore, then, you know, instead of giving a boy a fish, you're teaching him how to fish,
#
you're building an ecosystem which will produce its own stars, which will enable whoever wants
#
to dream within that ecosystem.
#
Now, this would seem to be an incredibly tough thing to do.
#
But I would also imagine that, as I said for futurists, as I often say for creators, that
#
we can tend to overestimate the short term, but underestimate the long term.
#
Now both of you have sort of worked at creating these ecosystems.
#
In fact, my episode with joy earlier was called creating sports ecosystems, if I remember
#
right, because, you know, you did a lot of work with during the football time of not
#
just holding an event, but trying to introduce a culture of football across the country.
#
And that was such an inspiring conversation for me to have.
#
So I'd love your thoughts on one in your experience of working with sport over the last decade
#
and a half or so longer than that.
#
But in this specific context, that has there been a sense that, yes, ecosystems can evolve,
#
we should not be cynical today, there may not be an ecosystem for safe fencing.
#
Five years later, they can be, we should have that hope, we should work towards that.
#
Or at uncertain margins, has it ever gotten frustrating that we are supporting talented
#
sports people, but these are individuals, there's nothing broader and deeper happening.
#
So what's your sort of sense of that?
#
So my sense of that is that definitely there is a much larger ecosystem than there was.
#
And again, what we were talking about, the fact that there is a private public partnership,
#
everything is happening, there is movement happening in sport, there is definitely movement
#
How well it's doing and how long term it is, is the basic question that you have to ask
#
And I think that, you know, when you're coming to it, Indian sport now is well served at
#
I think now between tops and Olympic gold quests, because remember, even more than this
#
thing, a lot of these people are saying they are very goal oriented, they are medal oriented.
#
And their reasons to be because funding, the sad bad fact of it is that, you know, Nandan
#
And I know this is a very tough struggle to turn on and say that it's about the process,
#
And it's something that they actually, Go Sports Foundation talks about to people who
#
are trying to help them in supporting this ecosystem.
#
But the fact of the matter is medals matter, newspaper articles matter, you know, even
#
if a Deepakarmaka does not get there to a medal place, at least she's there at a place
#
where she's bought attention to gymnastics, you know.
#
So tomorrow, if there's a gymnastics athletes in the world of gymnastics, it's easier for
#
somebody to invest in and turn on and say that, OK, I like Deepak, there's something
#
So I think the top level is well served.
#
I think the level below that, because it's in the hands of the Federation and state federations
#
more than anything else, is really badly served at this point in time.
#
It's difficult because we basically create an ecosystem where we've and this is true
#
For example, I'll give you another example in the 2017 World Cup.
#
You know, the first thing we went around when Javier and me joined as project director and
#
tournament director was, how good is the Indian team, do we have a chance?
#
And they turned on and they said something which is interesting.
#
They said, we have 30, 35 kids who are going to put into a camp and give the best exposure
#
for the next three years.
#
But what does that mean?
#
Does any developed country do that?
#
Will Argentina do that?
#
They look at the best, most talented 40 kids three months before or six months before and
#
then get those in and decide which ones are going to play.
#
But we don't have that actually, because we know that if we do that, these kids will just
#
not have enough exposure.
#
We identify X number of kids.
#
We put them together very early and we hope we do that.
#
So that's Amit, what we are doing well.
#
If an athlete is somewhere close to being Olympic worthy, medal worthy, I think today
#
Go Sport, TOPS, JSW, OGQ, all are getting together to do a very, very decent job of
#
making sure that they lack for nothing in those last 20 yards.
#
But if you're looking at, say, if you think of it, you know, if you look at the analogy
#
as an Olympic sprint, it's like saying the first 80 meters of that 100-meter sprint,
#
The last 20 meters, dude, we have all the support in the world you want.
#
And it's the first 80 meters, unfortunately, who does it rest with?
#
It rests with state organizations, it rests with organizations who don't really see results
#
at that stage, and that's the real lacuna in the system.
#
And let me tell you one thing.
#
There are two factors that are involved in it.
#
One is the fact that our federations are inefficient, which unfortunately, you know, I've said
#
But the second part of it is we really don't have a culture of checks and balances.
#
Who will the checks and balances come?
#
They'll come from parents.
#
So for example, the example that I always give that, you know, Europe has fantastic
#
facilities, you have great soccer teams and they win, not soccer, I shouldn't say soccer
#
anymore, football teams, and they keep winning.
#
But South America has also won eight World Cups.
#
Why have they won those World Cups?
#
Actually, nine World Cups, because they have won those World Cups because they have a passion
#
So there's a local league happening, there's a local football match happening, people come
#
in and watch it, just like in the US.
#
You travel in the US, you stop at a small petrol pump and they'll turn on and say, you
#
know what, that guy there, the petrol pump, he was an All-Star athlete for school and
#
they won us local championships in 2015.
#
There's a culture of that.
#
Because there's a culture of sport.
#
And that's the one thing I tell parents, I said, forget everything else.
#
If you can go, one of you can go and watch your kids playing a football game, that'll
#
keep the coach honest, that'll keep the team honest, and that'll actually make sure that,
#
you know, stupid things are not happening at that level.
#
Because 50 to 70% of the best athletes drop out at that level because, you know, somebody
#
else is there watching the sport whose father is more interested and wants his kid in, and
#
that's the point at which he leaves the sport and says, you know, I'd rather concentrate
#
on academics, it's less qualitative, the assessment is less qualitative and more operational.
#
And that's one of the biggest problems with Indian sport.
#
So these are the two basic issues that we are working with him.
#
I mean, if you solve them, you're doing 90% of the journey of Indian sport.
#
You know, firstly, you're just doing the top level and B is that below that, you just don't
#
have the domestic support, the support of people because this is not federations.
#
This is about other people supporting it to make sport work.
#
And I would agree there with Joy very much that it's not necessarily about sort of funding,
#
training and other things like that.
#
Sometimes all we need is more competition.
#
And we deal with this all the time with young athletes.
#
There are many federations where at best they hold the nationals and that's once a year.
#
So you'll have a sub junior nationals or junior nationals.
#
And there's very little in between.
#
If you can only simply bring more competitions at the junior level, a lot of the other stuff
#
You'll have academies that pick up coaches that get interested, but you have to build
#
the demand for coaching and build the demand for micro organizations to grow around sport.
#
And there is another sort of public private issue of how do you bring in more private
#
interest into sport, into sports coaching, sports scouting, sports training, more sort
#
of professional services around that.
#
And the reality is for a young athlete today, if you want to play at the international level,
#
it's much more expensive to be an Indian athlete than it is to be, for example, a European
#
And here I talk about, let's say a sport like tennis.
#
You take a young Spanish athlete versus a young Indian athlete.
#
There's some tournaments that now are held, but the average Indian athlete has to travel,
#
let's say 15 times has to travel internationally a year just to pick up the few ITF ranking
#
While that Spanish equivalent, he's like literally traveling 20 miles and playing a tournament,
#
traveling next weekend somewhere else and like literally going home after the match.
#
While the Indian is traveling, international flight ticket, hotel, parent has to probably
#
So the cost of being an Indian athlete is in fact, in some cases, much more than being
#
So we're loading up costs.
#
And what does that mean?
#
That means that the people who end up accessing some of those opportunities are people with
#
privilege, people with access either to their own money or to sources of funding.
#
And what we have to do is another way of democratizing is just building more tournament opportunities,
#
allowing competition to play out.
#
But when you do that, there are lots of very structural things to fix.
#
And one we cannot avoid is the issue of age fraud in India.
#
One of the largest issues which turns so many parents away is age cheating.
#
And that's across all sports, talk about cricket, talk about football.
#
I don't think there's a sport that hasn't been touched by age fraud, which is people
#
In fact, I mean, there's a ton of stories in terms of the way people have been people
#
born apparently in auto rickshaws.
#
I mean, we have a genuine problem with being able to tack someone's age on to some database.
#
And that is exploited and exposed quite often.
#
And the reality is something like this can be a structural barrier to keeping a young
#
person who is actually following the rules, keeping them in sports.
#
So I think you need competition.
#
But if you can't do that with the integrity, you're also sort of devaluing the sport.
#
So there's both more activity, but also better activity and fixing some very, very fundamental
#
problems in youth and junior sport, which must happen at the same time, and then allowing
#
some of that ecosystem to evolve around.
#
Like I said, if you look at the sport of badminton, you look at the number of academies today
#
Very few are government-driven academies.
#
It took one great coach to follow another great coach.
#
You have a Padukone followed by a Gopichand.
#
And you have a whole sort of stable of athletes come out.
#
And then what's happened?
#
The conversation with parents has changed.
#
You can be an Olympic medalist.
#
You can sort of play on a professional circuit.
#
The game has changed, but it meant that suddenly hundreds more kids are buying badminton rackets,
#
making a sort of a supplier successful, joining academies, making coaches commercially successful.
#
But that comes from repetitious tournaments, which sort of separate the competitors from
#
the contenders and allow the resources of the state.
#
Let's accept that the state must fund a little bit, but that resources have to be funded
#
funding the sort of the optimal talent, not funding too early and not funding too late.
#
And it's not an easy place to determine where to fund and how much the state should fund
#
But it is a balance we will find only if we can push people up and there's enough quantity
#
in the funnel to determine that the person is actually deserving and is not just simply
#
an anecdotal person who's sort of been lucky to get where they are simply because other
#
people didn't try or the pool of talent was not large enough.
#
So this is actually essential to the not just talent scouting, but the talent progression
#
pathway of recognizing how much of the resources of the state to spend on what level.
#
And there are very efficient ways to do that simply with strong sort of regional, state,
#
local and national competitions, but them happening at regular intervals and the data
#
from them being collected and acted upon smartly.
#
Yeah, that's a great point.
#
I mean, as I keep telling people who do my writing class or as I keep telling creators
#
that the only way to excellence is through endless iteration.
#
If I was recording one podcast episode a year, it would be pretty shitty.
#
But for many young sports people, they have that one sub junior national event to go through.
#
And even the point about falsifying age, we joke about that.
#
But you are right that it can be very pernicious.
#
I think Malcolm Gladwell had a study a few years ago or spoke about a study a few years
#
ago in maybe outliers, where he spoke about how, you know, if you're playing at the under
#
13 or under 14 level or whatever, studies have found that those born in Jan, Feb, March
#
tend to do much better than those born in November and December, simply because the
#
Freakonomics, I think has that Freakonomics, Freakonomics had it.
#
Okay, I somehow thought Gladwell wrote about it.
#
And the result of that is that, you know, at that age, the people who are in November
#
and December can't keep up with their peers who have those seven, eight extra months of
#
development, which makes for a big difference.
#
And so they tend to drop out.
#
And if people are falsifying ages, it's not a question of months, it's a question of years.
#
So you know, how are you really going to compete?
#
I have a funny story about this, by the way, which is that, you know, I used to play chess
#
So I remember I once went to the Maharashtra Junior Chess Championships, and which was
#
under 20, and I was 18 or 19 or whatever, I was well under the age, this thing, but
#
I had a beard, so Punjabi jeans and all that.
#
So I had a proper beard.
#
And after six rounds, I was a sole leader with six points in six rounds.
#
And they had an English newspaper, which was a local English newspaper, which was a biggest
#
selling English newspaper locally.
#
But I forget what it was called.
#
And the next day, I wasn't on the sports pages, I was on the front page, there was a photograph
#
of me with the headline, is this boy really under 19 or whatever the thing it was.
#
So you know, I eventually shaved off my beard, but that didn't really help me.
#
But yeah, I mean, that aside apart, I can see why it can have a pernicious effect.
#
Let's get down to specifics, because, you know, I'm so fascinated, not just by the fact
#
that you chose to embark on your journey, but that you've actually helped so many sports
#
people like Deepak Karmarkar is just one example you pointed out, but there are so many that
#
So can you tell me what your thought process was like when you started Go Sports?
#
Like, where are we going to make our specific interventions?
#
Because obviously, you have also at that point, a paucity of resources in terms of time, mental
#
bandwidth, all of that.
#
So where do you decide to make an intervention?
#
How do those areas of focus evolve over the years?
#
And what are the kind of specific things you do?
#
Like, is it identifying promising athletes and saying, okay, what do they need to train
#
Will give them that much money?
#
Or how does the thinking evolve?
#
So take me through that process.
#
So the first thing we did, and we try to identify what is the problem we were trying to solve.
#
And that was the problem of dropout, where we recognize that people who should not be
#
So sport has good dropout, the people who should be dropping out for the reason of sort
#
of attributing resources well, but there are people who should be progressing but are dropping
#
So we did a brief study at the very start, and trying to find the right age group to
#
So we were we didn't have huge amounts of money we were raising from friends and family,
#
some amounts of funds, trying to make very specific interventions.
#
So five, six athletes, where did we feel that change could even the little money that we
#
had could make a difference.
#
So we also looked at certain different sports which had not really been supported well,
#
like swimming, a few other sports which had pretty large sort of middle potential, but
#
had not really been looked at in some depth, professionalizing that working with coaches.
#
So very small micro interventions, and it was a little bit ended up being like pilotish,
#
raise a few lakhs, find five, six people give them out.
#
So it was really like cottage industry, nonprofit in the early bits.
#
But we started seeing that even small bits of support started, we started seeing feedback
#
from the system, people getting better stability coming into their lives.
#
And we said, hey, if this is making a difference, how can we up the game a little bit?
#
And how can we raise funds?
#
So by this time, I mean, I've also been running my law practice, I ended up meeting a lot
#
of people along the way.
#
They also start saying, hey, how can we help out?
#
I think they just saw the intent and they saw naive bunch of people trying to do something.
#
And you end up attracting a certain type of person also to you is my belief when you show
#
intent and you show purpose.
#
And we ended up working with Abhinav Dindra, Gopi Chand, Rahul Dravid, all of whom actually
#
came to us and said, let me know how I can help you.
#
And we had a few bits of fortune at work with Rohan Bopanna, he got us Roger Federer racket
#
and we auctioned it, we raised a pretty large amount of money and money from that auction
#
of Federer racket, Rahul Dravid cricket bat, all of that gave us our first sort of little
#
bit of extra money where we started building a scholarship program.
#
At which point, sort of my experiences from different ways of looking at talent, thinking
#
about talent, we built a selection process, which includes sort of evaluation and very
#
clearly we're not going out and scouting, we're looking at people who are out there
#
and we have an application process and interview process.
#
We build that out and it's sort of one thing leads to another.
#
And we come to a point in about 2013 when the CSR law changes, so the CSR becomes mandatory
#
for a lot of the companies and the CSR law originally had a bunch of different things
#
in this schedule seven, which lists all the things that qualify as CSR.
#
The interesting thing is at that point, the person who makes an intervention got nothing
#
to do with us at that point of time is Abhinav Dindra talks to the corporate affairs ministry
#
and says include access to support to sports.
#
So a specific entry comes in and if you want to talk about great man, the great man can
#
work in different ways, not just through achievement, but sort of different points like this.
#
And you get an entry in the Companies Act, which says training of Olympic and Paralympic
#
athletes in national and rural sports as well.
#
So a specific entry comes in, which recognizes sport as CSR eligible.
#
And for us, by that time, we've worked with enough athletes to show that we sort of know
#
We may not be experts, but there's good intent.
#
The foundation is also run sort of almost out of my law firm, very much legally oriented.
#
So a lot of paperwork, there's contracts, there's reports, all of the things that companies
#
So we're at this interesting place where we have enough athletes needing the support and
#
we're ready to talk the language of corporate India as well.
#
So in some sense, to translate the two worlds, speak corporate language to the athlete and
#
athlete language to the corporate.
#
And that has been the place where we've played for the last eight or 10 years.
#
And that's been in some sense, transformative.
#
So the thing we were able to do is support athletes in the early parts of their journeys,
#
maybe a step below many of the others and even before the government.
#
Very often, the only other source of support at the time is parents and in some cases,
#
So what Joy talked about, the last 20 meters, maybe we went from the 60th meter onwards.
#
So added another 20 meters to that.
#
We would love for more and more people to solve the rest of the 60 meters.
#
But we had to start in a particular place and that's where we chose in some sense.
#
What has led from there is just more and more people recognizing that there is a role for
#
sport which is greater than sport.
#
It is not just about the medal.
#
It's what the process means to us as people.
#
But more than that, what does sport mean for India?
#
You win a medal, great.
#
But I mean, you can win.
#
What happens 30 years later, let's say we top the medal table, is the job done?
#
We have to figure out what is the role of sport in society?
#
What is our perception of our own identities, our capabilities?
#
And there's a very beautiful thing that happened at this Olympics and Joy had a role to play
#
Joy talked about that sensitization program that we helped run for all of the athletes.
#
If you notice, almost all of the athletes by the end of their game, whether they won
#
or lost, they ended with a namaste.
#
And there's beautiful photos of Sindhu, Meera Bhai with a namaste at the end of that and
#
just sort of so proudly Indian at the end of that.
#
And it's one of the things Joy recommended and I was so happy to see many of the athletes
#
And I think all of those little things matter, whether you're there at the Olympics, how
#
you represent yourself, what you do and what it means to India in some sense.
#
Unashamedly patriotic India at the Olympics was a fabulous thing.
#
People went in heads held high, were disappointed when they lost, when they won, they won confidently.
#
And to me, that ended a journey that I had sort of begun personally.
#
It wasn't me who solved it.
#
I was a co-participant along the way, but we saw a well-resourced, confident Indian
#
athlete who belonged there and believed they belonged there.
#
And like I said, the medals were incidental to me, fantastic and fabulous to celebrate.
#
We could have got more, we could have got less, but still this was at a very personal
#
level, sort of the closure of a journey that I had personally begun and a great amount
#
of satisfaction to see the way the athletes competed and sort of the broader perception
#
of what the value and role of athletes is in society.
#
I think we have turned the corner and I'm optimistic of what the future holds as well.
#
That Namaste story is really inspiring kudos to you, Joy.
#
And it reminds me of what Tagore used to say and what Ram Guha also talks about whenever
#
he's on the show about the difference between patriotism and nationalism and incorporating
#
a little symbolic thing like that seems to me to be the best kind of patriotism.
#
My next question is something that both of you must have at different points in time
#
dealt with, which is that, okay, this is a largely private voluntary initiative to make
#
things happen, to make our sportsmen better, to bring pride to the country or whatever.
#
But at the same time, the state runs the sport.
#
You have to interface with the federations, you have to interface with the governments.
#
Did they ever feel threatened when you guys were doing the separate things that you were
#
doing in your particular domains?
#
Was there a problem of, hey, I am in charge or I should get the credit here, whatever
#
you're doing, did you take my permission before doing this or blah, blah, blah?
#
Is there that kind of friction within the system and if so, how did you navigate that?
#
So first of all, if you look at the system and where it stands, cricket, for example,
#
is completely out of the system because really it's not a sport that depends on any of this
#
So cricket does not bother about what happens, what doesn't happen.
#
With a lot of the other sports, I think Nandan would have seen a bunch of other sports where
#
I saw a couple of team sports.
#
And the fact of the matter is that it is very difficult.
#
There are egos involved, there are people involved and it's very individual based.
#
And again, the more loose the system is, you'll have an autocrat running the system, sometimes
#
a good autocrat, sometimes a bad autocrat.
#
But as far as I'm concerned, as Nandan will probably concur, I'd rather the autocrat
#
be the rules rather than an individual.
#
And in most cases in Indian sport, it's an individual rather than the rules.
#
So sometimes you'll have a good dictator running it, but he's still a dictator because he's
#
running it his way and he has all the right intentions in the world and he probably doesn't
#
want to make money out of the sport, but he's running it in a particular way because he
#
thinks that's the way the sport should be run.
#
And what Nandan believes and I believe in also totally is that if he could make those
#
rules much better, that the system and the rules are running it and we are working within
#
those rules of whoever is in there is running within those rules, that would be a far better
#
And that doesn't unfortunately happen as often as we would think and therefore those are
#
the problems that Indian sport has.
#
And those are the problems we'll grapple with as long as we cannot clear these lacunas
#
But I'm confident that one of the good things that's happening is the more results you get
#
and social media is a powerful thing, much more powerful than you would think.
#
And here when the pressure is brought to bear saying that this is what it is and these are
#
the people who are funding it, these people are making things happen, it's slowly going
#
to reach a position that is for a lot of these places who are in transition right now, more
#
They'll reach a stage where they have to turn on and say that, you know what, we can't just
#
go around doing whatever you want to anymore.
#
And you've seen cases already, I think, wrestling or even shooting, whatever it is, is it a
#
Is it a good thing that things are out in public?
#
You can turn around and say that, you know, you'd rather not wash your dirty land in public.
#
But I believe it's important for the process of purging the system and saying, OK, what
#
Let's get down and find out what's wrong.
#
And yes, there's going to be oversensationalization now.
#
But over the next two years, or at least the next year before, say, the next Asian Games
#
or Commonwealth Games comes, if there's a little bit of understanding of what went wrong
#
here and somebody saying that, you know, if you don't do it right the next time, there'll
#
I think that's good for Indian sport.
#
So what we do try and do is find as much alignment as possible.
#
The reality is that the model itself, the Go Sports model was structured in a way that
#
no one could stop us from supporting athletes.
#
What we saw ourselves as was a civic society organization.
#
Can anyone stop me from supporting a fellow individual?
#
I mean, you can stop me from running a league.
#
You will try and stop me from running a league.
#
You can stop me from sponsoring a tournament.
#
But you can't stop me from supporting a fellow Indian.
#
So I was very conscious of that and structuring the intervention itself.
#
Not to say that we haven't found a sort of pushback as well.
#
We even had a federation send us a legal notice saying that we were violating their intellectual
#
property by supporting their athletes.
#
I think wrong person to send that notice to, but not that we haven't seen that.
#
But I think we've been very careful to support athletes.
#
I mean, support of a fellow human being, which person in their right mind is going to stop
#
So the structure of how we made that intervention and finding these inroads in was an important
#
sort of structuring issue.
#
And I think we found a way to make it work for everyone.
#
And I think the real success in the model was in just how we integrated into the target
#
Olympic podium scheme very, very sort of large hearted team there, which really saw everyone
#
It could have seen everyone as a threat.
#
And I think previous iterations of the same scheme might have seen other people as a threat
#
and said only you or you can either be with a private foundation or us.
#
No one else should take credit.
#
But it was a much more open hearted, much more collaborative.
#
You tell us how you can help.
#
Let's share information.
#
If you have resources, you're bringing in maybe CSR resources that we can't tap.
#
Maybe you have a different structure which brings that money in.
#
We have government funds.
#
Let's make both of those work.
#
It may be in whatever ratio, you may have a smaller amount, but you may have more time
#
and attention to spend on a particular athlete.
#
And I think that positivity has huge amounts of wings to be taken forward to find these
#
private public collaborations, but in ways that the public structure is protected and
#
private bodies act with responsibility as well.
#
I think you'd be very, very careful because this narrative can also become individuals
#
becoming saviors of sport in India.
#
I mean, it can cross your own mind saying, hey, I'm making all this difference and it's
#
because of me and I'm the great man, right?
#
So I think the worst thing is to build that great man theory in your own head is that
#
you are the transformative great man.
#
And I think everyone needs to recognize you have three choices in Indian sport.
#
You can either be a participant, a spectator or a bystander.
#
And I think everyone has the choice to make of where they want to play.
#
And if you're, I mean, full respect to you, if you just want to be a bystander, you'll
#
sort of read the newspapers once every four years, you can be a spectator and participate
#
and make sport more successful.
#
But to me, I've always seen myself as a co-participant along with athletes, along with federations,
#
along with the government.
#
And I'll do my bit and I'd love for everyone else to do their bit.
#
So there is a progression.
#
Can you move from bystander to spectator, spectator to participant?
#
There are ways to participate and we will all find ways to participate if we really
#
I just found one way, which was civic participation through support to fellow athletes, fellow
#
And if anything, the government and others, federations included, have been encouraging
#
and saying, you're doing something we haven't been able to do.
#
In fact, I take as the, I was participating in the drafting of the top scheme many years
#
In many ways, I'd like to think that a lot of our ideas have been improved upon and given
#
scaled by the government.
#
So there's a startup versus sort of mature relationship going on as well, where a startup
#
can think and think of new things, new ways of doing, and it can be adopted at scale by
#
So we're going to see more and more progression.
#
Sport is getting more and more and more competitive while we look at these process improvements.
#
Other countries are advancing so much on sports science, on analytics, on performance enhancement
#
on just huge amounts of, I mean, we are, we may be walking now, but they are, they have
#
And if we want to keep up, we want to go up the medals table.
#
There's lots more work to do.
#
And it's not about sort of capturing turf, capturing territory, determining who is going
#
It's about moving forward and looking at the bigger game and knowing that everyone has
#
a specific role to play.
#
And I think Joy might have more to offer, but I mean, that's a perspective.
#
I don't know how many people share with me, but it's something I'm extremely passionate
#
about is that people, everyone has a stake in sport and everyone has a stake in sports
#
I just don't realize it yet if you have, you aren't a participant.
#
Yeah, these are, these are very inspiring and insightful words.
#
And I think listeners, you know, listening to this episode, seeing your humility might
#
just have found new sporting heroes.
#
You know, it's also fascinating.
#
I could talk for three more hours about this, but we've already spoken for three hours.
#
So I'll end with three final questions.
#
So that's like three threes right there.
#
My third last question is really for Nandan that tell me a little bit about TOPS, what
#
it did, who were the stakeholders, how they came together.
#
And then specifically tell me about the run up to Tokyo.
#
Like you've pointed out that, you know, this was different from Olympics, you know, though
#
you wouldn't use a phrase.
#
I'd say the expected value of the Indian contingent was much greater than previous Olympics, perhaps
#
even if we got seven medals, you know, we could easily have done more as you point out.
#
What was the difference?
#
Tell me a little bit about that, about, you know, what changed earlier, you said the hockey
#
federation changed a lot.
#
Great things happened in fencing, for example, where you wouldn't expect them to.
#
So tell me a little bit about the good work of these, you know, the last few years.
#
So I think the, like I said, the thing that changed was the scheme came out in 2013-14.
#
It was issued in end of 2014.
#
In fact, I was the one who got to choose the name even and then the logo of it.
#
So it was very interesting exercise I went through with the sports ministry, didn't do
#
very well in the early stages.
#
And I think there's an article recently by Amrit Mathur, which reflects this and, and
#
the challenges that the sports ministry itself saw with its own scheme, in some sense, losing
#
power over decision making.
#
But what happened is that Rio was a disaster games for us, right, with just two medals.
#
And I think it opened people's eyes to, okay, we just need to get this right.
#
And in fact, the scheme got transformed in ways known and unknown, seen and unseen over
#
the last five years, but with a proper professional structure, we have commander Rajesh Rajgopalan,
#
a Navy commander, come in as CEO, a full team get built, a professional team in the way
#
that any of our organizations would have built it.
#
So it becomes almost like a SWAT unit within the ministry and the Sports Authority of India.
#
You have a supportive Director General of the Sports Authority of India, a supportive
#
What they do is build this as the Indian Olympic platform.
#
They figure out ways in which federations can be worked with, so respect the autonomy,
#
bring the federation in, help with the selection, help with the sort of the programming and
#
So respect the regulatory function, but work with the athlete on the funding.
#
So there's still more work to do.
#
It's not a perfect scheme, but what it did is it moved the funding decision away from
#
the federation and to a slightly more centralized model of a high performance management team
#
making funding and training decisions, which included, for example, I think 80 lakhs spent
#
sending Mirabai Chanu to the US simply to work with the best physical fitness instructor
#
in terms of how to increase the, I think, six or eight kgs that she increased in her
#
weight in the last 12 months after having been injured.
#
So the right biomechanical expert.
#
This would have been unheard of eight or 10 years ago, 70 lakhs for one athlete for whatever
#
three months or six months.
#
You had whole teams go to other countries so that they didn't have to deal with quarantine.
#
So the money was not in question, best resource possible, but what it also did was it looked
#
at this much beyond just Tokyo.
#
So it built in more recent years, a developmental pool.
#
So it's already picked the 250, which may be going to the 2028 games.
#
So looking at people who are still eight or 10 years away, I mean, now Paris is just three
#
So people are already in training, which was a positive, but other little things which
#
we had originally planned, but got executed only much later, which is everyone on the
#
So for the first time they were paid, it was almost like a central contract that an Indian
#
cricketer would get, I mean, incomparable in terms of the quantity, but the fact that
#
it started happening meant that you respected and recognize that sport is a livelihood issue
#
for many of these people, is that people are playing and need to support families, right?
#
So those are very, very fundamental, but game shifting changes that occur.
#
And that brings the confidence to the athlete.
#
It also brought full hockey teams within its remit.
#
So while the Orissa government also funded, became a sponsor, gave Orissa a home, the
#
top scheme also funded both hockey teams, which was incredible.
#
And it includes the coach is hired by the federation, but also paid for by the Sports
#
So there's a system that is coming in, which no longer is asking, are you priority discipline?
#
If so, your federation will get the money and we'll get it distributed.
#
If you are an Olympic contender and you've qualified for the Olympics or in that range,
#
you have a shot to directly transact with the government, no longer through sort of
#
Earlier, you'd either get the money through your federation or there was the National
#
Sports Development Fund where you could apply and on an ad hoc basis, the sort of the most
#
elite athletes would get some amount, but without any systematization to that.
#
But in this, whatever, 120 plus contingent, I would say over 90% or more were on the top
#
scheme for a large period of time.
#
And there were probably another 50 people who didn't make it to Tokyo who were also
#
So you've got a sustained run of three, four, five years of support.
#
People turned up at the Olympics well resourced and in a position where they weren't thinking,
#
hey, I'm just here to turn up and I have got the entire pathway of being able to be at
#
Now, it's sort of just come and try and sort of put your mind to rest and perform.
#
And that is a sort of a moment in time in Olympic and Paralympic sport history.
#
And I must mention the Paralympics, which is still coming up and it starts at the end
#
And my guess is we'll have an even better Paralympics than we did in Olympics.
#
And that recognition of equity, of bringing everyone under the same umbrella, the top
#
scheme includes multiple dozen Paralympians as well.
#
These are massive shifts, I mean, they might sound basic to the average listener, but these
#
are huge shifts over a 10, 15 year period in Indian sport.
#
And it is a sign of the recognition of role of sport in society and not just medals for
#
I think there's a recognition of what sport can do at sort of secondary levels and sort
#
of the value it will deliver outside the pyramid to non-participants, to who we, what we consider
#
ourselves to be capable of.
#
And it is that recognition that excites me in the next stages, which is the recognition
#
of a collective, that there is a collective interest and that sport is in some sense a
#
commons that we all build together and that we will all benefit from.
#
So my penultimate question for the day is really about private players, like in the
#
sense we've discussed earlier in this episode about how a lot of private players rushed
#
in to do these leagues for different sports after the IPL and all of that, and just no
#
deeper thinking into it, just kind of following the trend and so on.
#
And there, of course, I would say that yeah, silly moves, but let everybody try everything
#
and whatever works works.
#
Also recently, what we've seen on Twitter, for example, is that a lot of companies are
#
doing moment marketing, they're trying to sort of expropriate the, you know, the image
#
of athletes under the guise of congratulating them.
#
And this is something that Joy, you've been tweeting about a fair bit, the dominoes effect
#
as it were, where these random companies will come up and they have not funded any athletes,
#
they have nothing to do with any of this.
#
And they'll be like, hey, we congratulate so and so and they'll get some brand building
#
Now, this is sort of the see me side of it, what you kind of expect from many corporates
#
But equally, there is, you know, a wholesome side to it, where many corporates have actually,
#
you know, opened their coffers to support these athletes and they can't even advertise
#
it right now, because apparently, IOC has that time period in which their sponsors can
#
talk about it and you can't so the people who actually put money into these athletes
#
are not allowed to talk about it is random people jumping on the bandwagon.
#
But my deeper question is that what shape can private involvement take in sport in the
#
Because on the one hand, you have this imperative that everything that a company does on spending,
#
you have to keep an ROI in mind at what is my ROI in this.
#
Now, I think, hopefully, at this point in time, it will start becoming apparent that,
#
listen, there is an ROI, sport is a big deal, it can uplift a nation.
#
When someone like Neera Chopra wins a gold, you know, it can have all these knock on benefits.
#
So what are the sort of different ways in which you envisage private players who want
#
to contribute, whether it's companies or foundations or individuals, what are the different ways
#
in which they can plug into the ecosystem and actually play that part?
#
So what is the shape of private involvement in the future?
#
So two things, there are many ways of going about it.
#
But the first is that, look, even now, even given all the CSR funding that is happening
#
in sport, that's still much less than it actually can be.
#
There's still a huge amount of place in CSR because you're talking about 2% of the profits
#
of lots of organizations.
#
And therefore, in the CSR pile, you know, again, Roti, Kapra and Makan has taken priority,
#
but sport can also take a priority because sport in its own way is equally transformative.
#
And I'll tell you one more thing.
#
You know, you look at the Odisha government, you've been talking about the Odisha government.
#
The Odisha government has spent on football, they've spent on, you know, hockey, everyone
#
knows about that, they've spent on Olympics.
#
One of the reasons they've spent is they're not fools.
#
The amount of bang for the buck that sport gives you for a five-crore investment or a
#
one-crore investment, if you want to make, you know, a five-kilometer highway, the amount
#
of money it takes you, you can sponsor a team for a year and it makes a difference.
#
So what I'm trying to say is that given the kind of money you spend in sport for the kind
#
of benefit and rub off you get out of it, more and more states are beginning to understand
#
that it's a ratio that actually works hugely in favor of sport.
#
And you know, I have this great story that I keep telling and I bring it back to cricket
#
is that I call it the cricket effect.
#
So by cricket, I mean, I don't mean cricket as in the game, but as in the insect.
#
If I was to, you know, give say Mukesh Ambani, you know, the books of reliance and say find
#
in these whatever thousands and thousands of crores, find the Mumbai Indians, he would
#
take half an hour, 45 minutes to just find that 200-crore entry, 250-crore, whatever
#
it is among those thousands and thousands and hundreds and thousands of crores.
#
But the share of voice of the Mumbai Indians as compared to the kind of investment of value,
#
the Mumbai Indians is huge.
#
It shouts much, much larger on many, many more pages than you would think.
#
And therefore, forget about everything else.
#
Let's forget for once that there are people who are as decent as Nandan Kamath and I really
#
have met such decent people on this, in this part of the universe.
#
Forget that, you know, they have altruistic motives for purely sport is so under leveraged
#
in this country that if you actually spend on sport, you will get rewards disproportionate
#
to the kind of money you spent.
#
That's a fact because they're so under leveraged that there's so much time and so little money
#
is being spent right now that even to spend a little bit of incremental money, you'll
#
get this much share of voice.
#
Have you realized the amount of voice, say, even in Odisha has got right now?
#
And look at the books and then you have a sober look at the books, you won't realize
#
it's not that much money.
#
So first and foremost, I just want to tell people sport is still in India for the next
#
five to 10 foreseeable future, a very good investment opportunity.
#
You're going to get more than enough value, more than enough bank for your buck.
#
That's the first part of it.
#
And then the second part of it is that once this journey starts, if you're in on the ground
#
floor, the opportunities of yours rising with the sport are absolutely huge.
#
So that's what I would go for, because see, it's easy enough to tell people that, you
#
know, do this for the good of the country.
#
But I generally don't buy that as a concept.
#
And, you know, altruism does not fuel basic economics.
#
It's got to be that, you know what, I see value in it.
#
And it's easier for me to spend money here and get value than it is somewhere else.
#
And that's the only way money is going to come.
#
And I'm telling you, in Indian sport, that value is there today.
#
Yeah, I would totally agree with Joy that our business models and their business models
#
and I think one of the business models is using sport for branding, right?
#
So participating in the great branding game.
#
And I totally agree, the easiest way to get into a newspaper is on the sports page.
#
It requires sort of the least effort to some tournament you name, you can get a photo in.
#
And that is just a sort of an example of the disproportionate share like Joy says.
#
Many would argue that we as Go Sports are just so minuscule, but get a disproportionate
#
And I do recognize that and it's important to recognize that you can give to sport and
#
what you can't take from sports, sport will give you when it's ready.
#
But to answer your question, I think CSR is powerful, but it's incumbent on people like
#
us, but also companies to recognize that it is not sport for its own sake, but also sport
#
for a tool to solve a lot of other problems.
#
And I think that those problems are so many that it's you can't even list them.
#
There have been great examples, even for example, of sport in criminal justice, of dealing with
#
recidivism in prisons, putting up a basketball court in a prison.
#
How can you use that effectively for CSR funds?
#
Imagine what can spurt from there and what is possible.
#
I'd also like to refer to something I was reading recently, a friend Sanjeev Jain and
#
Alok Sarin, two very famous psychiatrists, have written and put together an anthology
#
on the psychological impact of the partition in India.
#
It's a very important book, which talks about the fact that we haven't processed psychologically
#
But it's just one line that really struck me in there, which sort of refers to a UNESCO
#
study that happened in the early 50s, looking back at the partition, and it made this observation
#
which said that the rates of violence, that is inter-communal violence, are low in places
#
where the children of the communities played together.
#
So there are statistics which said that around the playgrounds of these various cities like
#
Aligarh and others, the violence rate was less.
#
Because the people who lived there had played together and their children played together.
#
So imagine a more active playing India.
#
I know it's altruistic joy and I think that altruism doesn't necessarily fund salaries,
#
but there is a larger play.
#
It is not medals for its own sake.
#
And I think the same study also talks about this notion of moving beyond literacy of numbers
#
and letters, but moving to a literacy of understanding, and a large part of that is rootedness and
#
identity of recognizing we are on a common path and there's rootedness of being together.
#
And I don't think there's a better thing than sport to do that.
#
I could disagree with everything that you believe in, your politics, your relationship
#
I could hate everything, but we can both celebrate Mira Chopra.
#
And there's universality and beauty to that, which we must capture and must recognize and
#
And seeing this as a much larger game than just medals, we are part of a large social
#
And I don't mean that in a negative way.
#
It's an opportunity which we must see a sport as an instrument to deliver results, not sports
#
for its own sake, not medals for their own sake.
#
Yeah, no, that's a stunning insight about parents whose kids play together less likely
#
I mean, it gives a whole new meaning to Orville's term of war minus shooting.
#
And I completely agree with what you said, Joy, about appealing to the self-interest of
#
companies that don't do something just for CSR or just because it's mandated or just
#
It's just because it's good for you, and that's a great example of reliance among
#
One could argue that cricket is low-hanging fruit and all that.
#
But I mean, look at the goodwill if you had funded Mira Chopra for the last five years.
#
Look at the goodwill you would get just for that.
#
So there's just tremendous opportunity in thinking ahead.
#
My final question to many guests tends to be on what gives them hope and what gives
#
them despair in whatever their specific subject or context is over the next 10 years.
#
I don't want to ask you about despair.
#
Obviously, what would give you despair is if things stay the same or we go backwards
#
But both of you are working for hope in a sense.
#
So tell me, 10 years later, if you're looking at the India of 2031, what do you think is
#
a realistic place for Indian sport to be in?
#
At a philosophical level, I don't see why the Olympics should be a goal at all or any
#
But in general, do you think, for example, that we will ever become a major player at
#
the Olympics and start competing with China in the US and whatever, what's the sort of
#
landscape that you see?
#
What are you moving towards?
#
So first, I'll start off with you talking about the Olympics.
#
I just want to talk about the World Cup football, which is the other mega event.
#
So in the 1980s, the Japanese came together with a plan saying that we want to win a World
#
Their plan was a 100 year plan.
#
So in 1982, they turned on and said that in 2082, we want to win a World Cup.
#
And now they've actually, after about 25, 30 years of their plan, they've said, you
#
We possibly might win one by 2050.
#
That's the kind of gestation period in football, and that's not necessarily the case in all
#
But what I'm trying to say is that if you're going to work in sport, those are the kind
#
of decades of the kind of numbers that you're going to look at to make significant differences.
#
It's taken 13 years for us to progress from Abhinav Bindra to where we are.
#
And Nandan's right, possibly, given what we had, the potential was for maybe 10, 12 medals
#
rather than just the seven medals that we got, and it's one of those things.
#
But what I'm saying is that to make that to the next step of 20 gold medals and 30 gold
#
medals, I think, is clearly unrealistic for the next couple of decades, next two, three
#
What I'd love to see for Indian sport is whoever goes there to the Olympics is at a competitive
#
And you're going to have guys who we think are very good who are going to crash out.
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It happens all the time in sport.
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You're going to have guys who we think aren't that great who are going to do it well.
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But that's what sport is all about, saying that, OK, we have sent now 120-odd athletes
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there and 50-odd para athletes.
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We are already starting to send numbers which are significant.
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I'd love to see over the next decade, maybe 250, maybe double that number, and forget
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Again, let's talk, as Nandan said, if we have the potential to win 25, 30 medals, I'd be
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Will that tally end up at 25, 30?
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But if we even send squads like that that have that kind of level, and I think one thing
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that's going to happen is a lot of guys that pressure is going to come down.
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The moment, it's like South Korean archers.
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South Korean archers are used to winning Olympic medals.
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If they don't win Olympic medals, they'll come back in the Olympics and win them.
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It's not life or death.
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Hard archers, it's life and death, and especially in games like shooting, like archery, where
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heart rate, pressure matters so much, that things like that are so disruptive.
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Whereas, where you have a more stable system and you're used to winning over large periods
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of time, those things will stabilize.
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That's my wish that in those cases, we get to that, maybe double that number and have
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that many athletes, 25, 30 athletes, who we think can compete for medals.
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The second part is I'd love to see much more private involvement in Indian sport in terms
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of sustainable leagues.
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Forget about whether they're with federations or without federations.
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I'd love to see leagues that last for 10 years.
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I'd love to see leagues, not just leagues that last for 10 years, but leagues whose
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team owners last for 10 years.
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Because if you're in a revolving chair of team owners saying that, okay, three years
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somebody's come, they're there, then they realize there's no money in it.
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You find some other, as you said, in common North Indian, you find a new guy to fool and
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say that, okay, next three years you take over, I'd love to see somebody sitting in
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sport for 10 years saying, you know what, I've invested in sport and it's beginning
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So these are the two visions I have for Indian sport.
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I would like to expand a little bit on Joy as well.
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But my first dream for Indian sport is seeing more teams at the Olympics.
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So this time we had the men's hockey team and the women's hockey team.
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They were the two biggest stories of the Olympics other than Neeraj Chopra and his gold medal.
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The reality is a lot of our other athletes are anecdotal athletes.
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We've figured their way out of the system.
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We've sent them abroad, got them individual coaches to fly in and work with them.
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When a team works, that is an indication of a system working.
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And I would love to see India participating at handball, volleyball, football, obviously
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for various reasons, basketball, there's three into three basketball.
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You don't even need a team of 15 people.
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You have a three by three basketball.
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Getting more and more team sport is going to be critical.
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But at a larger level, I'd also like the discourse to just move away from this hyper-competitivism
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and just about medals, medals, medals.
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It's just that any young person who wants to play the sport has a place to play and
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enjoy sport and just makes it a part of their lives.
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And what is quite indicative is what is the sort of water cooler conversation that happens
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When I went to the US, I had this sort of moment where someone told me, what's the difference
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between the US and India?
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In the US, a meeting starts with, did you watch the football game?
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While in India, it starts with, which IIT did you go to?
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So is that conversation going to change?
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And that's when you know, cultural shifts have occurred.
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Is it so embedded in society that you just talk of it as a matter of course?
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You don't need an Olympics to talk about sporting achievement.
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And sport for fun, sport for all of the other things that it's useful for, sport for building
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All of those become as important as our medal quests.
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Well, deeply inspiring and thanks so much for, you know, sharing your time and insights
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I loved having you on the show.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, head on over to the show notes.
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I have linked many articles written by Nandan as well as a book co-edited by him.
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You can follow Nandan on Twitter at Nandan Kaam with one word and you can follow Joy
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at Joy Bhattacharj, that's J-O-Y-B-H-A-T-T-A-C-H-A-R-J.
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I'll also link it from the show notes.
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You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
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Thank you for listening.
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Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
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If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
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You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
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this podcast alive and kicking.
