Living With The Commonwealth Games
The Commonwealth Games will come to Delhi in 2010. This date provides a convenient target for the various authorities in charge of the city to complete major development projects.
The vast Akshardham temple has already opened on the banks of the Yamuna River, near to the site of the future Commonwealth Games Village. 100 acres of shanty housing and small-scale industrial and agricultural land were progressively taken over by the temple developers over the last decade. The pristine complex that now stands there is much better propaganda for the new India. Built to the most exacting standards by 7000 craftspeople from all over the country, the temple is huge and impossible to dismiss. If the architecture is not enough to impress the tens of thousands of visitors who arrive in 2010, its three exhibition halls offer hi-tech presentations (in several languages) of some of the highlights of Indian culture and religion.
The temple is a symbol of the new city: hygienic and emptied of the organic past, monumentally modern, bristling with surveillance cameras and security, and inspired by a steely, expansionary, highly distilled ideal of Indian culture that can provide the logic and momentum for India's imagined global supremacy.
The Games Village itself will be a substantial new development (far more so than the Asiad Games Village built for Delhi's previous encounter with such an event in 1982). The Delhi Metro will open more lines by 2010, including a stop at the Games Village. The flyovers on the Ring Road have been completed, so that the drive from the airport is now a smooth up-and-down flight.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been moved out of informal housing in the last couple of years so that the planning logic can be applied equally everywhere, some of them after having lived in the same place for 30 years, many of them immiserated and turned into refugees. Artists' impressions in the newspapers of empty walkways through a chocolate-box Old Delhi full of boutiques and existing only for outsiders give a sense of much more such eviction in the future.
Some of these takeover projects result in astounding triumphs, and others leave behind rambling horrors. But even the most ardent advocates of the processes we see now in the city acknowledges a certain unease in the stomach. Earlier this week, the Hindustan Times, one of the largest and most joyfully uncritical English-language national dailies here, carried the :
"No stray cattle on Delhi roads. And no taxi drivers who will fleece passengers. These are not utopian visions of the Capital but guidelines for the 2010 Commonwealth Games.
Government officials prepared the list after holding meetings with the Commonwealth Games Federation, the Indian Olympic Association, Ministry of Sports, the GoM on the Games and trade chambers like the CII, which felt that issues on the street had to be addressed along with contests on the field.
According to a note received by the Delhi government, during the Games, roads should be free of beggars, touts and stray dogs and cattle
"We don't know how to comply with these directions," said an official in the urban development department. He said the government was yet to figure out how beggars could be stopped from venturing onto the streets and what to do with stray animals.
The note also said that 20,000 English-speaking volunteers were required to act as guides for foreigners who would visit the city. But it will cost a lot, said a senior official, "Unless the people are paid well, they will not come forward as volunteers."
Another note said Delhi would need at least 100 doctors with specialisation in sports medicine and an equal number of physiotherapists for the 8,000 sportspersons who would participate.
"We don't have so many specialists in sports medicine," said the official. The officials have realised that while many of these ideas worked at the Manchester and Melbourne Games, it will be difficult to pull them off in Delhi."
we still remain confused really - this life is not really about helping each other to grow better together it's about greed and profit making and impressing others and making what we think is 'progress' but what is really regression - what is the Commonwealth games all about anyway - "commonwealth" common what - common greed more like it - there seems to be no sharing of wealth in this exercise at all and what is the mighty queen of UK doing as head of the "commonwealth" not sharing much of hers that's for sure!
Purely at the level of athletics and sports, India performs more than creditably in the Commonwealth Games, garnering a fairly impressive series of top places, but in recent decades has found the Olympics very hard going. There was a time when the Gold Medal in hockey seemed to belong to it permanently. At the most recent Games in Athens, apart from Mr. Rathor's splendid performance in shooting, the nation's performance was rather sad. It is no disgrace not to be good at sports and athletics, except that India would like to do well but does not. The people in charge of such things clearly need to be both more diligent and more imaginative.
I not bovvved where it is, i watch it on tv.
There is obviously a vast amount of things we humans can do with the human body to demonstrate it flexibility and dexterity and agility.
And to entertain ones family friends is amusing - to entertain the world is a means of making a living.
However I see no worthiness it any of us pushing ourselves to painful limits just to prove we are better than anyone else - or any country pushing itself to suchlimits to prove it is better than any other country.
Isn't this were drug enhancing pratices take hold - just to prove a point?
maybe finding the point would be more profitable than proving or making it?
I think the previous correspondents have missed the point of the piece completely. It is not about the Commonwealth Games but about the culture clash between modern western ideas of what a city should be and traditional Indian values. Only if India is itself ashamed of the beggers and beasts should it remove them and it should do so without the spur of the Games. New developments always involve clearance of space and good Governments should do this compassionately, but will always be open to criticism. We cannot say whether the changes at the Temple site will be seen as great as the construction of the area around of St Peters in Rome or whether it will become a white elephant - I hope the former
Instead of us all missing the point - you may in fact have misinterpreted the responses!
We can all read and interpret and choose to respond in our own way -
please don't assume that because we are not expressing what you think we should be expressing we are all missing the point.
Your interpretation whilst being your own thoughts are not guaranteed to be accurate or correct!