New Delhi: August 29. National Sports Day. The day India's top sporting awards are presented by the President at Rashtrapati Bhawan. Gentle reminder: it's also hockey legend Dhyan Chand's birth anniversary.
While the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna is the country's top sporting award, the Arjuna Award - instituted in 1961 - is how the event has been witnessed and remembered for the last 50 years. Named after the third of the five Pandava brothers in the Hindu epic Mahabharata, the Arjuna Awards seek to celebrate the sportspersons who have both made and left their mark in the sporting arena.
The mythical hero, an ace marksman, is celebrated for having never missed his target. And it is only befitting that the award bearing his name are given away on the birth anniversary of a 20th century legend, who too never missed his mark on the hockey field.
Over the last few months, there has been a raging debate whether Dhyan Chand should be given the Bharat Ratna ahead of Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar. Former Olympians Leslie Claudius and Gurbax Singh feel that Dhyan Chand did not get his due in India and have even demanded a joint Bharat Ratna for the Hockey wizard. But just think a little and you will see the man does not need a Bharat Ratna.
Agreed that most people would not know that National Sports Day is celebrated to honour the man whose tales of valour on a hockey field and magical stickwork has attained mythical proportions in the sporting consciousness of this nation, but that does not take away anything from one of the few names in Indian Olympic history whose reverence has come to rest despite no reams of literature to record his brilliance and no highlight films for us to gasp at.
Sports is a matter of the heart and not of the mind. Countries may want to use sports and sporting disciplines to announce their arrival on the world stage, to make a point, to showcase their abilities, to garner regional support and exhibit dominance; but for the sportspersons, it is about recognition and acknowledgment of their talents. It is about personal and national pride and it is about building a world without borders. And Dhyan Chand embodied this spirit to the fullest.
Can you imagine his strength of character and political consciousness when at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where every one bowed to Adolf Hitler, Dhyan Chand - leading the Indian contingent at the opening ceremony - refused to give the Fuhrer the Nazi salute, the Americans being the only other exception. And as Hitler watched on, Dhyan Chand and Jesse Owens set the hockey field and the athletics track on fire.
His magic undoubtedly transcended borders as well. Can you imagine the feeling that must have struck the residents of Vienna who built his statue and brought it to life with four hands and sticks in a bid to capture and pay tribute to his unparalleled ball control and wizardry-like stick work.
The man was revered across the world and even today no discussion on Indian and in fact, world hockey is complete without Dhyan Chand and his three Olympic golds. The National Stadium, built in New Delhi for the first Asian Games in 1951, was later named as Major Dhyan Chand National Stadium. And in 2002, the Union Sports Ministry in India introduced a Lifetime Achievement Award in sports in the name of Dhyan Chand.
As a pre-independence India sportsman, he played for nothing but pride. As a sportsman in independent India, he played for the nation's glory. But we failed the man when he fell ill and died in 1979. When he came to Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences, they sent him to the general ward. A journalist's article eventually got him moved to a special room. The fact that public memory had to be jogged tells its own story.
On his 106th birth anniversary today, let's not talk about whether he needs to be given a Bharat Ratna to make up for all that we did not do for him. Remember him, remember what he did, and inject some pride in Indian hockey. That is the biggest tribute we as a nation can pay to him.
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