How Have You Made Your Country Proud?

We want her to make us proud but what have we done to enable her profession? (photo credit)

My Twitter timeline has been full of Dipti Karmakar. Tweets about her feats at the Olympics. The joy of her making it to the finals and the anticipation of her performance in it. And then comments about how she did and not winning a medal. While most of them have lauded her for her determination and attempt at the death vault, some of them are still unhappy about India not having won any medals in the Olympics.

As someone who has no interest in sports, I have a very objective view of things. I feel that expecting India to win medals once in 4 years is so unfair when we give zero encouragement to sports as a profession the rest of the time. We do have sports in schools and some parents also send their children to hobby classes. But that is more from a fitness or an extra curricular activity point of view. No one really tells their kids that they can be a Sachin or a Dipti when they grow up. Sports is fine as long as it remains a hobby. But serious careers are the ones that come from studies and degrees. And that is the attitude we have for sports in general.

But the irony is that while this is what we do to do our country proud, we expect our athletes to bring us that sense of pride through medals! We need to introspect and ask ourselves what we have done to make our country proud. What have been our efforts in encouraging even people who wish to have the best sporting facilities in the country to enable to bring back medals and make us proud?

What do you think about this?

This post has been written for #CreativeCurves under #BlogOEmotion week and this is the final day prompt, pride.