Dreams of a Billion: India and the Olympic Games - Boria Majumdar & Nalin Mehta - ★★★.½

AUTHORS: Boria Majumdar & Nalin Mehta

GENRE: Sports Nonfiction.

RATING: 3.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: Part exposé, part biography, part aspiration. Highlights Indian sports, sports players and the governing bodies with a special focus on the Olympics and the then-upcoming Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Recommended to Indian sports lovers.

Most sports lovers in India who belong to my generation or are younger have seen India reach the pinnacle of sports consistently in only one game - cricket. A game that is not even played at the highest level in most countries. A game with just a few truly competent international teams. But as the Indian team is (quite possibly) the best in this game at present, cricket gets all the attention, all the fame, and consequently, all the moolah.

We forget that field hockey is the national game of the country and that we were (and are) the record holders for winning the maximum number of Olympic gold medals in the sport, though the heyday is long in the past. We become aware of the names of sportspersons such as Abhinav Bindra, Gagan Narang, Dipa Karmakar and Karnam Malleswari only AFTER they win acclaim for the country. We celebrate medal winners once they win but don’t hear anything about them on their journey to the medal. As the author of this book says, “We all like appropriating champions once they become champions. If only we focussed on them when they really need our support; before they become stars.”

Is it any wonder then that India, a country of almost a billion and a half people, stutters and stumbles on international sports arenas, and gathers single figure medal tallies despite such a huge population?

Not an ounce of the finger-pointing here is to be made in the direction of the sportspersons. In fact, I would say that our sports stars win medals despite and not because of support from the various governing bodies. Most of us know that there is a lot of political interference and regionalism in sports, and those in charge of various sport authorities are mostly from a non-sport background. There’s no dearth of talent here; what’s lacking is the polishing required for these raw diamonds to sharpen their skills and shine brighter.

This book meticulously goes into the Olympic story of various sports and sports stars in India, highlighting the determination and the difficulties every step of the way. It doesn’t stop at covering just the top medal winners such as P.V. Sindhu or Mary Kom, but also includes the stars we have long forgotten (such as Khashaba Jadhav), the names who came close to the medal podium (such as PT Usha and Milkha Singh), and even the contemporary names we hardly hear about simply because they won medals in the Paralymics (such as Deepa Malik.) The book even covers unexpected topics such as the role of the Indian army in the Olympic medal tally and how the arrival of television led to a change in sporting passions.

I loved the portions where the focus was on individual players in sports I relish, and the sportspersons I admire. Seeing an entire chapter dedicated to the Paralympics also won my heart. But most of all, I loved the anecdotes and trivia scattered in every chapter. For instance, did you know that at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, India was one of only two Olympics contingents not to salute Hitler during the opening march past (the other being the USA)? Wow! I felt so proud of those Indian players when I read this fact!

I was totally captivated by the book for the first half or so. But then came the hockey sections, and I began zoning out at times because the authors decided to begin right from the first Indian hockey team at the Olympics, which was way back in 1928. I get why the authors felt they should start with 1928 – those were the best days of Indian hockey with one of the all-time worldwide hockey greats Major Dhyan Chand – but to read four lengthy chapters on just one sport was saturating. The current hockey players hardly found any mention while the authors went nostalgic over our past glory days in hockey.

The next chapter was, bizarrely, focussed on cricket – a sport that has not been part of any Olympics since 1900. Again, the purpose was to highlight how the rise of cricket led to a downfall of the other sports, especially of hockey, in India. But I am so anti-cricket (Yup - an Indian who can’t stand cricket! #WeExist!) that this chapter just irritated me. I guess the ‘dreams of the billion’ might be to see cricket included in the Olympic line-up some day so that India can have a great chance of a gold. Not for this Indian, though.

Boria Majumdar is a respected sports journalist in India, and his knowledge and his passion for various sports is clear through the book. But the writing could have been finetuned. There is lot of back and forth in the chapter-wise structure. A chronological approach would have worked far better in assimilating the information. Also, the information is repetitive at times.

Reading this book in 2023 means that I have the benefit of hindsight. The entire content was directed towards one point: how India would fare at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. However, as the book was published in January 2020, there was no way the authors could have guessed that the world would soon face a global pandemic, there would be international lockdowns, and the Olympics itself would be pushed ahead by a whole year, leading to several upheavals in performance due to training and travel issues. So if you do read the book and you know what happened at Tokyo in 2021, you will have a somewhat satisfied yet bittersweet feeling. Though the authors haven’t been overly optimistic about India’s chances, they were still hopeful, and the reality did prove them partly right. Tokyo was India’s best ever Olympic performance so far, but the anticipated medal winners disappointed while new names shone.

On the whole, this would be an amazing read for Indian sports lovers. (Other sports lovers could also try it, but it won’t resonate with you the same way.) Though the Tokyo part of the book is now dated, the rest of the content offers an amazing insight about Indian sports then and now. After all, the dreams of a billion didn’t stop at 2020, right? There’s still Paris 2024. 😉