Indian sport’s Forever Men

Nirmal Shekar in The Hindu

Many of the sports administrative bodies are besmirched by feudal attitudes where the top guys have reigned for long and appear to claim ownership rights over their ‘property’


The best thing that has happened to sports in India in a long, long time — longer perhaps than many of us have existed on this planet — is the laudably idealistic yet remarkably pragmatic intervention of the Supreme Court into Wild West territory — the landscape of cricket administration.
So much of what the well-meaning lay people have expected of the men who control sports has been trampled under mercilessly and maliciously, that a good majority of sports-lovers in the country have found refuge in nihilism and come to believe that nothing will change in the state of affairs.

When you think that something has been transformed for the better, very soon you realise it is nothing more than chimerical and it might be foolish and useless to bravely make your way through the haze.

If sports politics is even more Machiavellian than Indian politics in general, then that should come as no surprise. For we resign ourselves to the fact that sport is not a matter quite as important as electing the country’s Prime Minister.


Sliver of hope

But just when we thought that it is a tunnel without an end, the Supreme Court, headed by its upstanding, noble Chief Justice Mr. T.S. Thakur (who retired recently) has offered us a sliver of hope here or there — in fact much, much more than what we may have come to expect 70 years after the country’s Independence.

A popular, veteran Indian sportsperson, who tried to get into the administration of his sport not long ago, put it succinctly the other day when I asked him what was wrong with sports administration in the country at a time when the nation’s richest, and perhaps one of the world’s wealthiest sports bodies, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), was making front-page news for all the wrong reasons every day.

“You tell me what is right with it. It stinks. I shudder to think that such mismanagement, corruption, nepotism and chaos can exist in 2017,” he said.

Most well-meaning people in the world of sports, when asked the same question, not surprisingly come up with the same answer: “a total lack of professionalism.’’


Reasons for lagging

This is an over-arching judgement that seems to ignore the nuts and bolts of everyday affairs in major sports in the country. From experts down to lay fans, almost everybody has an opinion on why such a huge nation should not be among the leading performers in the world of sport. Infrastructure, money, attitude, culture…you can think of dozens of reasons why India does not stand tall in the world of sport.

Says Joaquim Carvalho, Olympian and hockey administrator “Sports governance in India lacks transparency and accountability. Most officials are not passionate about sports at all. They use this platform to keep themselves in the news and also indulge in corruption.

“I have a poor impression of sports governance because I have seen these officials as a player and later I as someone connected with the conduct of the game. They have vested interest and development of sport is never a priority for them. Basically, it helps them stay in the news, build connections and enjoy junkets. Sports governance in India is absolutely unprofessional.”

While it will be unfair to make a sweeping generalisation — there are a few sports that benefit from modern management where the administration is totally transparent in its business. But most are besmirched by feudal attitudes where the top guys have been the same since the days of your childhood, and they appear to claim ownership rights over their ‘property.’

‘Honorary’ positions are not ones manned by individuals with perfectly altruistic intentions. To even expect it is ridiculous. Even saints do what they do to get into the good books of the big, all-knowing, all-powerful man up there.


On an upward swing

There is a flip side to all this. Adille Sumariwala, IAAF executive council member and president, Athletics Federation of India, says, “Sports is on the upward swing in India. Television and the leagues in virtually all sports have increased the fan following. Children know the names of kabaddi players, not only cricketers. Television has brought sports to people, there is more awareness. It’s a matter of time before sports emerges much stronger. There are opportunities to make sport a career in life. And so sports is on the upswing’’.

But here is the catch. Do we have honest officials with a long-term goals in mind? It is indeed boom-time in Indian sports. But the launching pads, corporate support and fans’ enthusiasm may quickly evaporate if the quality of administration remains the same.

How many of our present sports administrators come in with a clear mandate and then move forward stridently to carry it out? Do they go through the same strict annual evaluation process as do brilliant business school graduates?

Success as sports administrators demands a few basic skills in areas such as communication, organisation, decision making, value system and team building.

“Indian sports administrators are special. I must admit that. They are in a category of their own,” said the late Peter Roebuck, my best friend among foreign journalists visiting India frequently, during one of our post dinner conversations.

What Roebuck referred to was mainly cricket but he was curious enough to want to know more and more about other sports. Leadership skills can be either cultivated or learned but the men and women who run our sports are keen on only one thing — staying where they are with a great love for being in the spotlight.

How many times have we seen sports bosses appearing prominently in photographs of athletes who return after world-beating success at airports across the country?

Long ago, a top Indian sportsman returning after winning the world championship told me something that was shocking. I asked him who the gentleman who was hugging him in the front page of a leading Indian English language paper? “I swear, I have never seen the guy before,” he said of a man who was a senior administrator in the sport.

Of course, the nameless one is part of the Forever Men club.

SOAS students have a point. Philosophy degrees should look beyond white Europeans

Tom Whyman in The Guardian

We all know what students are like nowadays, don’t we? Special snowflakes who can’t cope with the real world, who refuse to venture out of their safe spaces to learn anything, who are so achingly PC they won’t even let their institutions serve sushi in the cafeteria. When they’re not wasting their lives on social media or fighting for a fairer world for all, these mewling, overprivileged babies like to spend their time policing their academic superiors on their curriculum choices.

The latest scandal? Step forward SOAS, University of London students’ union, which has outraged basically every outlet in the rightwing press by calling, astonishingly enough, for such great philosophers as Kant, Plato and Descartes to be banned from the curriculum, just because they are white.

As part of a wider campaign to “decolonise” the curriculum, the union has proclaimed, “the majority of philosophers” taught at Soas should be from Africa or Asia, and – when the great names of European philosophy are taught, which is something that should only happen when absolutely necessary – it should be from a critical standpoint, accounting for (for instance) the colonial context in which Enlightenment thought arose.

Read the news articles on this story and you’d be convinced that some great act of intellectual barbarism was about to take place. But in truth, the notion that anything untoward is going on here is mostly nonsense.

Allow me to explain. First, it must be noted that despite the headlines no one, at any point, has actually called for white philosophers to be dropped from the curriculum at SOAS. Even at its most extreme, all the SOAS students’ union demands (and note that their demand has no binding force whatsoever) is that European philosophers only be taught in preference to African and Asian ones when necessary. Adopting this principle, if it turns out that say, Kant, has expressed some insight that is vital for understanding some aspect of reality, then he should be allowed to remain in the curriculum.

This seems fair: there’s only so much thought one can study as an undergraduate, and students should have a right to not waste their time on any second-rate thinkers who happen to have snuck themselves into the western canon. If we’re going to teach philosophy at a university, then it seems more than worthwhile to critically reflect on which philosophers we’re focusing on, and why. Indeed, this is something that Kant himself, whose mature work is pitched against dogmatism in all its forms, would welcome.

Second, philosophers should also welcome the demand that European philosophy be studied in its appropriate social and historical context. This doesn’t just mean PC hand-wringing: it can be used to actively enrich our understanding of these texts. Consider an example such as Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes – one of the founding documents of western political thought. Hobbes argues that we need a state authority invested with absolute power – because otherwise society would collapse into what he calls “the state of nature”, where no one has any security and life is nasty, brutish and short. The state of nature is often called a fiction, but if you read Leviathan closely you’ll notice that Hobbes is actually getting it from early anthropological accounts of Native American civilisation, which he describes as being devoid of any understanding of law. This of course is deeply problematic – and it’s exactly the sort of point that, if we understand it in its proper context, can allow us to get a better, richer understanding of Hobbes (and obtain a better understanding of our social world in general).

Third, even if the SOAS students had demanded that all white philosophers be banned from the curriculum, it’s still unclear to me how much would actually be lost. You wouldn’t know it from reading any of the other news articles on this topic, but SOAS doesn’t actually have a philosophy department – and nor does it offer a BA degree in philosophy. Rather, SOAS offers a BA in world philosophies, which is run by the department of religions and philosophies. Given the nature of this course and the nature of SOAS as an institution, it makes complete sense for the students to want to study more African and Asian thought at the expense of European. Of course if nearby Birkbeck decided to purge its curriculum of European thought, that would be an entirely different issue. But these matters are context-sensitive, and diversity across curricula should be welcomed.

Finally, the stereotype of students as easily “triggered” special snowflakes who use political correctness to police their teachers is one I simply don’t recognise. Most of the students I’ve encountered as a university lecturer are bright, engaged and want to be challenged. And to be honest, that’s something I recognise in the statement issued by the SOAS students as well. This oh-so-scandalising statement reads to me like it must have been produced by students who are deeply invested in their course and care passionately about what they study. As educators we have a duty to respond to and nurture this passion.

Philosophy can teach children what Google can’t

Charlotte Blease in The Guardian


At the controls of driverless cars, on the end of the telephone when you call your bank or favourite retailer: we all know the robots are coming, and in many cases are already here. Back in 2013, economists at Oxford University’s Martin School estimated that in the next 20 years, more than half of all jobs would be substituted by intelligent technology. Like the prospect of robot-assisted living or hate it, it is foolish to deny that children in school today will enter a vastly different workplace tomorrow – and that’s if they’re lucky. Far from jobs being brought back from China, futurologists predict that white-collar jobs will be increasingly outsourced to digitisation as well as blue-collar ones.

How should educationalists prepare young people for civic and professional life in a digital age? Luddite hand-wringing won’t do. Redoubling investment in science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) subjects won’t solve the problem either: hi-tech training has its imaginative limitations.

In the near future school-leavers will need other skills. In a world where technical expertise is increasingly narrow, the skills and confidence to traverse disciplines will be at a premium. We will need people who are prepared to ask, and answer, the questions that aren’t Googleable: like what are the ethical ramifications of machine automation? What are the political consequences of mass unemployment? How should we distribute wealth in a digitised society? As a society we need to be more philosophically engaged.

Amid the political uncertainties of 2016, the Irish president Michael D Higgins provided a beacon of leadership in this area. “The teaching of philosophy,” he said in November, “is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal to empower children into acting as free and responsible subjects in an ever more complex, interconnected, and uncertain world.” Philosophy in the classroom, he emphasised, offers a “path to a humanistic and vibrant democratic culture”.

In 2013, as Ireland struggled with the after-effects of the financial crisis, Higgins launched a nationwide initiative calling for debate about what Ireland valued as a society. The result is that for the first time philosophy was introduced into Irish schools in September.

A new optional course for 12- to 16-year-olds invites young people to reflect on questions that – until now – have been glaringly absent from school curriculums. In the UK, a network of philosophers and teachers is still lobbying hard for a GCSE equivalent. And Ireland, a nation that was once deemed “the most Catholic country”, is already exploring reforms to establish philosophy for children as a subject within primary schools.

This expansion of philosophy in the curriculum is something that Higgins and his wife Sabina, a philosophy graduate, have expressly called for. Higgins’ views are ahead of his time. If educators assume philosophy is pointless, it’s fair to say that most academic philosophers (unlike, say, mathematicians, or linguists) are still territorial, or ignorant, about the viability of their subject beyond the cloisters. If educators need to get wise, philosophers need to get over themselves.

Thinking and the desire to understand don’t come naturally – contrary to what Aristotle believed. Unlike, say, sex and gossip, philosophy is not a universal interest. Bertrand Russell came closer when he said, “Most people would rather die than think; many do.” While we may all have the capacity for philosophy, it is a capacity that requires training and cultural nudges. If the pursuit of science requires some cognitive scaffolding, as American philosopher Robert McCauley argues, then the same is true of philosophy.

Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job


Philosophy is difficult. It encompasses the double demand of strenuous labour under a stern overseer. It requires us to overcome personal biases and pitfalls in reasoning. This necessitates tolerant dialogue, and imagining divergent views while weighing them up. Philosophy helps kids – and adults – to articulate questions and explore answers not easily drawn out by introspection or Twitter. At its best, philosophy puts ideas, not egos, front and centre. And it is the very fragility – the unnaturalness – of philosophy that requires it to be embedded, not just in schools, but in public spaces.

Philosophy won’t bring back the jobs. It isn’t a cure-all for the world’s current or future woes. But it can build immunity against careless judgments, and unentitled certitude. Philosophy in our classrooms would better equip us all to perceive and to challenge the conventional wisdoms of our age. Perhaps it is not surprising that the president of Ireland, a country that was once a sub-theocracy, understands this.

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