And a Gold for Delhi

One of the unintended and happy consequences of the 2010 Commonwealth Games is that it announces the rise of this new, professional, cosmopolitan Delhi as India's number one city.

A 2010 Commonwealth Games venue in New Delhi | Commons

You should have been at the boxing stadium in New Delhi’s Talkatora sports complex this Thursday evening. There wasn’t an empty seat and the mood was as it must be in a boxing stadium. It was so even when an Indian was not in the ring. It was a Northern Ireland boxer challenging an Englishman (and a fellow Briton!) for the gold. But the crowd knew which side it was on. The Englishman had won a very unpopular semi-final against Indian boxing’s hottest dude Vijender Singh on negative points, without landing a single punch. So the crowd would settle the grudge by putting its voice behind the boxer in blue. Both the chants during those nine minutes may have confused him. One, Ireland-Ireland, from a crowd that obviously did not care that that nation was different from Northern Ireland and was not even in the Commonwealth. And the second, jeetegi bhai jeetegi, neeli chaddi jeetegi (the blue shorts shall win), is obviously something he would not have understood either. But he knew the crowd was his from the moment he landed the first punch and a blood-thirsty war-cry went up. Immature, brutal, cheap, you can call it anything. But it was a boxing stadium. What do you expect from a crowd that had paid to watch one of the most violent sports people can legally play?

Of course, the mood was even more raucously partisan when an Indian was in the ring. Any time the referee gave the opponent a count, the entire stadium counted in unison: one, two, three, four… If you, like me, aren’t a die-hard boxing enthusiast, you would also have flinched when the referee stopped the bout in the super-heavyweight final to wipe a sliver of blood from the face of the Trinidad boxer, just savaged by India’s Paramjeet Samota, who ultimately, and not surprisingly, won 5-1.

But we are not taking a moral position on boxing. We are looking, instead, at the sociology of that stadium. Of course there was a sizeable VIP and invitees stand, but the rest, nearly three-fourths of the stadium, was packed with paying janta. A lot of them, in fact a hell of a lot of them, were women. The people of Delhi who had braved inefficiencies and worse to buy tickets, challenging commuting arrangements and walked long distances from parking lots to watch what was, for most of them, their first-ever game of an international sport other than cricket. These were regular middle- or upper middle-class Dilliwalas. Not your usual my-uncle-is-a-big-shot-so-he-got-me-a-free-pass-type that Delhi is notorious for. And they were now getting their money’s worth, forgetting for a while all the scandals and scares, many of them real, and all the self-flagellating shame-mongering that was just so much hogwash.

You could have also been at the lawn tennis or badminton stadiums in south Delhi, newly built to world standards. Tickets here were not cheap, but on most days, even in the earlier rounds, these were full. You can check me out on this. Across the five days of the Mohali Test match, arguably one of our greatest and most exciting victories ever, what cricket’s hyper-ventilating commentators call a humdinger, the number of spectators each day at the badminton stadium was much greater. And that is when Mohali’s capacity is at least ten times more. Remember that silly demand made by Suresh Kalmadi that the BCCI shift the two Tests as these would take away CWG audiences?

Nothing of the sort happened. And if you wanted further evidence, you should have also been at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium at the eight-day track-and-field events. On any of these days, the paying crowd that came in to watch mostly foreign winners, and some Indians who they knew nothing about, was greater than the total number of spectators over five full days at Mohali. Do check that out. In fact there was almost no major CWG stadium that won’t pass this Mohali test for paid attendance. And we thought cricket had not only killed Olympic sports, but had buried them so deep nobody would ever resurrect them.

So who did, actually, resurrect it? Kalmadi? Lalit Bhanot? M.S. Gill? Ha! You would have known the answer if you were at the Nehru stadium this Wednesday, the last evening of track-and-field. Sixty thousand Indians cheered the quartet of wonderfully talented, competitive and humble young women who ran a brilliantly intelligent race to win India’s first Commonwealth track gold in 58 years. Now, when was the last time you saw 60,000 Indians cheer like that an Indian sportsperson not called Sachin Tendulkar? In fact, I will stick my neck out and say, never. Most definitely, never a non-cricketer. And they were cheering four girls whose faces they would not recognise, and many of whose names they would struggle to pronounce. It just so happened that I saw this sitting next to Milkha Singh, who had given himself some bad press by predicting that no Indian would win a track medal, and his former volleyballer wife, Nirmal, who was probably the only Indian that evening to predict an Indian gold. And as the golden quartet passed that stand in their victory lap and saw the great Milkha, he was instantly forgiven as they lined up to be hugged by and photographed with India’s greatest and most-loved athlete ever, now with tears in his eyes.

Many of us will have strong views on who are the villains of what could have been our most disastrous international sports event ever. But who are the heroes, now that the Games have ended up looking like a spectacular success? It is the city of Delhi and NCR, their emerging new, cosmopolitan, non-sarkari population, particularly the new professional middle class. See those clips of the CWG galleries, even the VIP sections. You will find hardly any of your familiar Page 3 faces. Nor the usual suspects so desperate to be seen in a corporate box in an IPL match at Kotla. They are the ones who threatened to leave Delhi during the Games, not able to tolerate the mess. To be fair to them, they mostly kept their promise and were not even seen hunting for VIP invites. Olympic sports are not where the Indian upper crust wants to be seen. It was for people who wanted some genuine, clean outdoor entertainment and fun, to enjoy exciting new sports, and to get to know this wonderful but unknown new crop of Indian athletes. That is the test that the middle-class Dilliwala passed so well. And by no means has Delhi shown itself to be insensitive to corruption and inefficiency: you noticed the boos when Kalmadi spoke, by the same crowds that so enjoyed the Games and the ceremonies.

Let me, therefore, stick my neck out once again and say that no other city in our country, except Delhi (with NCR), could have pulled this event off. One of the unintended and happy consequences of this CWG is that it announces the rise of this new, professional, cosmopolitan Delhi as India’s number one city. Its infrastructure is by far the best, its social indicators way ahead of any other, and now it is challenging the most serious slur on it: that it is merely a power-driven sarkari island of patronage, peopled by surly, parochial, rent-seeking and illiberal people. At a time when Mumbai is declining faster than the American dollar and Kolkata is held to ransom by its awful politics, this rise of Delhi is something for all of India to cherish.

And if you wanted even more evidence of this remarkable change, you could have been at any of the stadiums, to watch the same Delhi where everybody and his uncle is a VIP with full nakhras go through the kind of security they had never seen before. But they were patient, even appreciative of a fine, fine job done by the police forces. I myself must have gone through at least 50 security checks in these 12 days, and even though I was recognised by many policemen, was never waved in without full frisking. It is true that more has been invested in Delhi than in any other Indian city in the past decade. But in these two weeks, Delhi has proved itself worthy of that.