Even after the spectacular rise of Anand, Indian Chess didn’t dramatically improve. Three decades after Anand’s rise as a star, only one other Indian is in the world’s top 20 - Koneru Humpy - in women’s. Unlike the glories that cricketers get, Anand is quite underrecognized and underappreciated in India.
What Anand did for Chess, Prakash Padukone did for Badminton. He won the inaugural Badminton Worldcup in 1981 and followed up winning the prestigious All-England Badminton Championship in 1982. Saina Nehwal (won Bronze in 2012 London) and Pullela Gopichand (who won the all England Championship in 2001) are the only other major badminton stars from India.
India had the occasional athletic brilliance in the Asian games in the form of Milkha Singh and PT Usha - both sensations of their time. However, India was never able to impact athletics in the world arena. Since about 2000, India has produced strong players in shooting and is able to get its 1-2 medals in each Olympics on the back of the shooters.
Rise of Cricket as a National Pastime
While the sports mentioned in the previous sections are often played and respected, nothing captures an average Indian as much as Cricket. However, it didn't start that way.
Until 1983, Cricket was not a very popular game in India and was followed primarily by the anglophone youth in the cities. The first ever recorded game of Cricket dates to 1721. In June 1932, India was admitted to the elite league of Test Cricket-playing nations - the sixth nation to be admitted - after England, Australia, South Africa, West Indies, and New Zealand. Some of the earliest players such as Maharajah Ranjit Singh and Duleep Singh Ji are still remembered.
However, India had to wait 20 years to score its first victory - in 1952 against England - and in the same year won its first series by beating the newbies Pakistan.
The 1970s was the classic era for Indian Cricket, with a spin quartet of Prasanna, Chandrasekhar, Bedi, and Venkataraghavan and a solid set of batsmen in Gavaskar and Gundappa Vishwanath. Under the captainship of Ajit Wadekar, the Indian Cricket team won back-to-back away series in England and the West Indies.
While India was putting up a solid show in Tests, it was failing to adapt to the new format - One Day Internationals, or ODIs- that became a fixture in 1974.
Cricket World Cup 1983
When India landed on the shores of England in the spring of 1983, very little was expected of them - much less than what the hockey team was expected of in the 1928 Olympics. In the previous two Cricket World Cups (in 1975 and 1979) India had won just one match in total - and that too against an absolute rookie - East Africa. In one of the infamous matches, the famous batsman Gavaskar had forgotten that he was playing a shorter format of the game.
India was put in a tough group with the invincible West Indies - who had won the previous two World Cups - a strong Australia, and a promising Zimbabwe.
In the opening match for India, played on June 9, it had to meet the West Indies. People expected the defending champions to crush the minnows. When India lost their opening batsmen - Srikkanth and Gavaskar - for cheap runs, viewers set up themselves for the obvious.
However, one unlikely hero - Yashpal Sharma - changed the game with a career-best score of 89 to take India to a very decent score of 262. When the bowlers came out to play, they took inspiration from this miraculous batting display from Sharma and did the unthinkable: they bowled out West Indies with six overs to spare and 34 runs short.
India crushed the defending champion in its opening game!
Suddenly, India felt a new energy and momentum. In the next game, they easily walked over Zimbabwe by bowling them out for a cheap 155. At the end of the league stage India was placed second and qualified for the semifinals.
It was incredible. Had India gotten back home just with that, its fans would have been quite proud. However, there was more to come.
In the semifinals, India met the home team England. The local press was reporting that India’s honeymoon was soon to end. England had won the toss and elected to bat on a slow pitch at Old Trafford in Manchester. The pitch really suited the Indian medium pace bowlers, who were suddenly transformed into a lethal unit. They walked all over the English batsmen to get them out for 213. The batsmen then got into the act by whistling past the English target without breaking a sweat.
India was now in the finals! No one could believe it. A team that had won just one game in the entire two World Cups before then had now upset the three strongest sides of the tournament. Time for the final showdown.
It was a nice, warm day on the 25th of June, 1983. The Mecca of Cricket - Lord's Cricket Ground at London - was basking in the sunshine and packed to capacity. Clive Lloyd, the tall gentleman from Guyana, proudly walked out onto the center. He could sense the grandness of the venue where his team had won the previous two World Cups. It was now a matter of formality to get the hat-trick or three in a row. He called the toss correct and had no hesitation to bowl.
It was time for the world’s most lethal bowling unit to mark their targets on a hapless subcontinent batting unit, helped by prodigious seam on a classic Lord’s wicket. Roberts, Garner, Holding, and Marshall didn’t disappoint with their fiery ability to throw hard Cricket balls at over 90 miles an hour. The opening batsman, Srikkanth, had some success, but the rest could not last long.
West Indies was all over India. At the end of their innings, India had just 183 - never enough to be even of nuisance value to the juggernaut batting unit of the West Indies.
When West Indies came down to bat, India’s first victim was Gordon Greenidge. He was taken out for a paltry one run. However, that brought the two legends of the game - Viv Richards and Desmond Hayes - together. They scored runs freely. It was only a matter of time.
Out of nowhere came the Indian medium pacer Madan Lal. He took both the legends and the allrounder Gomes in quick succession in a matter of just 19 balls and six runs.
Now, India sensed that they were in the game. Captain Kapil Dev started rotating his medium pacers in an expert fashion to slowly strangle the West Indies batsman. The normally free-flowing batsmen were hamstrung by Mohinder Amarnath, who gave only a total of 12 runs in his seven overs. The West Indies' middle order lost patience and got out cheaply.
When Holding was finally caught LBW by Man-of-the-Match Amarnath, the stadium erupted. India had won. Kapil Dev was beaming when he picked up the trophy, and that was an iconic picture for a whole generation.
That victory changed the nature of Indian Cricket and in fact, the whole game of Cricket. Kapil Dev and his men got a hero’s welcome and continued the momentum by winning the World Championship in Australia in 1985.
Just as Hockey faded in Indian minds with a string of defeats from the early 1980s, Cricket rose. Indians now have a new set of heroes to celebrate. With the popularisation of TV, Tendulkar and the economy, Cricket became a religion in India. And with the entry of a billion fans, the sleepy game of Cricket was permanently transformed.
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Chapter 17: Into the Future
In the past 67 years, India proved its naysayers wrong by surviving as a nation of 1.3 billion people and 22 official languages. It was able to successfully integrate a variety of peripheral territories and its Constitution is a classic. It was able to withstand multiple wars and stand neutral in a highly polarized world.
While we can take comfort with the fact that we survived and we didn't end up a basket case, this is not the best we can do. We need to not just survive, but thrive. We need to push our accelerator. We need to show the world what we are capable of and be the model nation of peace. We need to be the elephant - that neither hunts nor gets hunted.
In the past 17 chapters, we saw the various things that happened in the past. In this final chapter, I will take a glimpse at the future.
I will just start with my parable of the well.
There was a nice village that had a big well in the centre. One day, there was a big robber raid on that village and many villagers jumped into the well to sav
e themselves. Some of them fell by accident, others were pulled into it while rescuing others. Some were confused, some were just like a sheep following the leader. Few fell in to be with their friends and a few others were forced in. Eventually, everyone was in the well. Many died in the process.
A few generations grew inside the well, making use of the water and little resources. By then, the external attacks were long gone. But, the villagers didn't realize that. Scores died, living in squalor, and there was misery all around. As the number of generations grew, people started forgetting that there was once a village above the well.
One day, a guy named Mohandas finally rose up from the well and saw that there was a world around him. He started grouping others and slowly people started getting out of it.
The challenge now is broken down into four parts:
Convincing people about life outside the well, in the village.
Finding enough ropes
Getting them out in an orderly fashion.
Advocating patience as it is going to take a lot of time to get a million people out of the well.
This was the state of India and many other countries 60 years ago. Leaders in many countries have since then brought the ropes to pull out the people.
India was a little slower than a few other countries, but we still pulled out as many people as Japan and Germany did. India's middle class with college education and professional jobs is more than the population of Germany. However, the Indian well had a lot of people to start out with and thus while Germany was done with pulling 80 million people out, India is not yet done even after pulling out 150 million people since 1947. You can take people out of the well only so fast and it takes time.
However, we can drive the process faster if:
We can get a lot more ropes, and
Dig a few more holes on the side to create alternate paths.
The ropes are in these case are the jobs. For a long time, our government was the only provider of good jobs and there are only so many jobs (ropes) to pull people out. What other countries have done is bring more ropes - entrepreneurs - and dig more side holes (foreign investments) to get the people out. Most successful countries have done this - Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Europe and most recently China (flooded with foreign investments and entrepreneurs).
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Here is how India can jumpstart its well rescue process aka journey towards a developed society. I will focus on the practical stuff.
Step 1: Make it Easy for Entrepreneurs
Who took Japan to its heights? Its government did its part, but the bulk load was by its entrepreneurs. The folks who created Toyota, Honda, Sony, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Komatsu, Mitsubishi, Fuji, Nissan... In the case of Germany it was Daimler, Siemens, SAP, BMW and millions of smaller manufacturers. The same for US, Europe, Singapore and now China.
The ONLY way a country can get out of misery is by enabling its entrepreneurs, who will bring more ropes to pull out the people. No country has ever become developed without involving its entrepreneurs. India is the world's worst place to do business. I know it both from statistics and cutting my teeth running business there.
This can be fixed by dismantling our "License raj". Some of these are easy fixes - make it easy to register a "Private Limited", have more predictable rules (unlike the infamous "Vodafone" witch hunt - where the Indian government retroactively applied a tax rule when the company bought out the telecom player Hutch), and enable quick approvals throughout the system. Get the government out of the way.
Step 2: Get the Women Involved
Our women are underutilized in the process of pulling the people out. We give them useless tasks and don't get them to fire up. India has among the lowest percentage of women workers in a professional capacity.
All developed societies had a huge jump in women entering the workforce around the Second World War. That's how they developed. If we can get the women to join the workforce - we get twice more hands and grow twice as fast. It should be simple math, right?
We need to have a substantial push in getting the women in politics, business, and professional workplaces. If it takes some reservation to do the initial push, let's do it.
Step 3: Get Every Child Going to a Good School
Indians whine incessantly about the education system. If there was a World Cup in whining, Indians would get it for their daily complaints on the education system. For all its faults, India's best schools fill up Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Canary Wharf, Mckinsey, Microsoft, Harvard, and Oxford. In a dozen places I studied, I don't know of a single friend who is not doing well. Thus, the primary problem is less in our best schools, but the fact that 95% of the population don't have access to good schools. UNICEF estimates that a third of India’s children leave before finishing primary school. This leaves a huge room for improvement.
If we can get every Indian kid to have the standard of education of even a Kendriya Vidyalaya or DAV or DPS, India can have a 20X boost in productivity. That means more schools, more good teachers, better technology.
Step 4: Time to Add More Judges and Police
India has too few courts and judges. Added with archaic laws and processes, we have a dysfunctional judicial system. When the judiciary is dysfunctional, society cannot progress. Enable legal reforms to simplify the processes. But, more importantly add thousands of judges and millions of new policemen. We cannot have better security until our police and judiciary levels reach international levels. First, fix the quantity and then fix the quality.
Step 5: Fighting Graft (Corruption)
This is a complex process and there is no one-step silver bullet.
Better Technology
In Chennai, once I was almost hit by a bus when I was waiting on my bike at a signal on a nice, early morning. The signal was red, although no one was on the road. The bus behind me wanted to move ahead on the red, while I was standing in its way. Should I or should I not have obeyed that red light? Was I too dogmatic instead of pragmatic? Our poor technology (having red signal when the intersection is empty) has made a simple thing of following a rule into a dilemma. It has made rule-breaking the pragmatic option, instead of the other way around.
One way to resolve such an issue is by having better technology. If the signal detected motion on my side and not on other sides, it should directly change to green. That's what happens in developed countries. Use the right technology that makes rule-following pragmatic. When everyone around you realizes that the rule and its implementation is logical, there is less of a reason to break it (unless you are crazy).
This is just one simple example. We can have better technology throughout society. Some more examples:
Spend a few million rupees to design a very good website that has all the government forms used in all the government departments. The site has to be so intuitive that filling government forms should be a very simple and straightforward process. Make it very easy to get this accessible on mobile. If you do this well, you can eliminate the army of bribe seekers outside the government offices.
Create videos and test materials to enable a prospective drivers to learn the road rules in a simple, fun way. Every type of education can be made fun. Let them learn the rules, and then pass the test for “free” (without paying a bribe). Which Indian would not love things for free?
Use analytics tools to analyze what the market prices of homes are. Most of the real estate black money involves understating the sale price. Once you build a strong analytics tool, it will be hard to understate price and save tax. Same for sales tax and others. Share this data openly on the government website.
Make credit card transactions more prevalent. Subsidize the payment technologies so much that people get incentives not to use cash. Cash transactions are the source of half the headache.
These are starting points. There are a million things we could do as system designers. The goal of any society should be to make rule-following pragmatic. In India, many of the rules are illogical,
outdated, archaic, and stupid. This has made even logical people ignore the rules. Once the rational people start following the rules, the government can go brutal on the irrational rule-breakers.
Never Have a Meaningless Rule that Cannot Be Enforced Well
Any rule that cannot be enforced is tyranny and unfair. The good ones would be the only ones to follow (due to self-conscience) and bad ones will not (no enforcement). An example of this is the prohibition law in the US in the 1920s that made it illegal for people to buy alcohol.
Alcohol is so entrenched in Western culture and so easy to manufacture that the laws were openly flouted. Crimes, gangs, mafias, and corruption ruled in cities like Chicago due to that. India has many such rules that are similar. Alcohol is bad, but cannot be banned. Same for cigarettes, drugs, prostitution, trans fats, etc. If you cannot enforce a rule very well, don't have it in the rule book. By having these weak rules, you weaken the fear and respect for law. You then create these dirty surfaces over which germs then fester. Throw these unused furniture out the window.
Simpler Rules
Fifteen years ago, the cops near my home changed one of the key roads into a one-way. As a dogmatic rule-obeyer, I biked around that road for a long time, while no one else obeyed the rule. However, once someone told me why the rule was in place - to make it easy for a local film star to park easily - it no longer made sense for me to obey that rule. I broke that one-way rule as an act of civil disobedience.
From Tryst to Tendulkar: The History of Independent India Page 25