From: Veeramany.Sthanumurthy@bbs.oit.unc.edu (Veeramany Sthanumurthy)
Subject: Olympics, India, world etc
Organization: Extended Bulletin Board Service
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 22:22:15 GMT

There has been a lot of lamenting, expressions of sorrow,
outrage, anger and other appropriate emotions usually on 
display along with the mandatory sundry rationalizations.
Posters noted for seeing humor in such metaphors as coconuts
for Indians (not unlike the other foodstuffs used for such
comic purposes - the OREO cookie and the slightly lesser
known banana) are extremely annoyed by the dip in India's
standing in the world arena due to its lack of representation
on the Olympic medals tally.  Others seem to be eternally
perplexed by the ignorance of the sports commentator while at
the same time not entirely certain about his (lack of) accuracy 
either. Still other good samaritans (a real one for a change) 
want to set things right by a campaign of letter-writing to the
peacock network, among other things.  A sane voice or two may 
have been raised - but only one has reached this node.

A second wave of thought may already be in the process of forming
somewhere in the windy city but, thanks to the alleged widespread
use of kill-files, to mindlessly mix metaphors, it has been nipped
in the mud. Since I haven't been reading SCI closely (except Uma's
posts: just checking) I came upon this avalanche quite accidentally
(like hitting <shift>N instead of CTRL-SHIFT-N - a search procedure
quite effective - except in case of posters who change subjects
quite wantonly and those who just followup that way.) But, I digress.

Why, to make one (in)substantial point before the wordly police of SCI
start barking, is everyone so concerned about an admittedly shoddy
piece of reporting (if that) from the mouth of a sports 
commentator who might have been tuned out well before India started
marching (across the TV I mean)? To check if this was indeed the case, 
I did a small survey (Margin of error: 98% - considering the number 
it could even be 99%) of my colleagues: one of them wasn't sure 
India even marched (I can't blame him - the Indians had marched off 
the screen before Costas had finished his comment); another didn't 
hear a word after the opening political salvo (historical perspective); 
a third (didn't watch) wanted to know if it was true (that India had no
astroturf: not poor); a fourth didn't turn on the volume till the Americans
came on the screen, and so on. I wouldn't have been watching the thing 
either (though I was taping it to make sure to watch anything that might
be worth it) if it weren't for the guest we had from India. To
digress even further, in India if I understood correctly, they
could see the Opening ceremony live. Pretty advanced for a poor
country, eh?

Why, to stretch my audience thinner, is one of these comments about
Indian inadequacy in sports/stupid comments of an Indian participant
in a Ms. Universe contest more harmful to India's standing than say,
the various political stances of India; or, the communal strife in
India? There seems to be something wrong here, but to quote Kannan
Subs, I can't prove it.

Lastly, it may be too early to reach any conclusions about savithri's
postings and the responses they elicited, but, if I may say so, her
extreme generalizations notwithstanding (why not, someone may ask)
the most comment she seems to have drawn is of the patronizing kind.
Can we cut the patronizing and just stick to bullshit?

Sthan.

PS. I apologize to Kannan S for dragging him in the middle of
this and will promise not to anything novel ever again. And,
Paul, keep it up - just do a spell-check and run it through
alt.prose or misc.writing.
--
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