No one panders to the baser instincts of masses more than the media. Pimping at that level is necessary for the commercial success it seeks.
In the wake of on going Asian Games where few of our athletes are winning medals, media is in full swing in publicising their success. In a country starved for sporting success commensurate to its size this obviously makes great sales pitch for selling newspapers and prime-time news. However, what is surprising is the emphasis being given to socio-economic background of these athletes in the coverage, which is invariably of poverty and struggle. Poverty is particularly presented in gory details. “Daughter of a rickshaw puller”, “son of a daily wage labourer”, “father selling land to support training”, and other such headlines full of qualifying phrases of poverty and struggle are dominant in the mass media. On one hand it would seem fair that media is highlighting the plight of sportsmen in order to bring attention to the apathy of a society which has consistently failed in coming to aid of its sportsmen; but the gory details of poverty put on display smack of something else as well: an attempt to completely individualise the achievement.
Sports are a form of controlled warfare, without death and blood. Most embodiments of virtues of a warrior such as health, discipline, spirit to rise against odd, cohesiveness, heroism, conscience , inventiveness and vigor are also displayed in the sporting arena or field. So like war, sports also have been very close to society’s heart as a stage of displaying its superiority. Sports, like war, become a test and testimony of limits of hardihood of virtuous men and, by implication, the society. Success in the sporting arena is taken as the surrogate of a society’s ability to produce and rear men of these virtues. Hence sporting success appeals to innate sense of superiority and general competitive passion of a society (country!) as a whole, and is manifested in patriotic pride and collective ambition.
And, there also appears to be a clearly visible connection between the strength (economic or otherwise) of a society and its sporting success. Cohesive and well developed societies have a system (of early selection, grooming, easy access to scientific coaching and equipments, financial support to athletes in their budding years etc.) in place which makes sporting success regular and wide spread. Man are proud to belong to such a uplifting society and credit it for their success.
However, laggard societies tend to portray success as an individual effort. It is their way of covering up their incapacity to build collective means of achieving and leaving it to individuals to find their own ways and means to it. However, when those scraps of achievement through individual effort do come, society is happy to appropriate them in its name (no wonder we celebrate even the success of foreign citizens of Indian origin!), as if just by belonging, even in most tenuous way, one has drawn from it. In such societies there is always a sense of disgruntlement in members, and individuals express it by their subtle attempt to delink their achievements from collective; it is also a good means of saving the achiever from the shame of belonging to a moribund collective. In a way, it is saying that men are good, system is bad, and their achievement is despite the system.
We are perhaps one such society. Sporting success here is still rare and highly individual effort based. There are many sportsmen in our country who have more value individually than the term ‘Indian sportsman” denotes.
Sitting in our homes and acutely aware of shortage of success, we support our moral as a member of the collective by clinging to few success stories of individuals and identifying with them. The highlighting of stories of struggle and poverty of these athletes is a way of individualising their success. Bringing forth the point that they alone have paid the price for their success through their inordinate struggle to succeed; society has played no role in it.
It is substitution of lost hope of achievement as a collective with the hope arising from individualised effort based success.
Need for sustained source of hope is one of the baser human instincts. And, this is what media is trying to pander to by those headlines above: we may be nothing as a society but as individuals we still have hope. A kind of reverting back to the primitive, where nothing is required to be shown in the name of collective institutionalised support: every man for himself.!
It is not difficult to see that in laggard societies the attrition of individuals from society, specially of the able individuals, picks up speed; in view of that, this act of mass media to go whole-hog for absolute individualisation of the sporting achievements of our athlete is insidious in some sense.
-Pulastya
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