Mahesh Bhupathi

The Fifth Slam: India Opens Her Heart To Top-Flight Tennis

The year is 2011. It is the august month of August.

The India Open is being launched with much fanfare.

The India Open is now officially the fifth Grand Slam tournament , the latest jewel in the ATP and WTA calendars.

In the wake of the unprecedented success of the Commonwealth Games 2010 in New Delhi, this tournament has been given hallmark status.

India have thumbed their nose at the Chinese and have cornered a Grand Slam tournament.

This Slam has its unique challenges. The courts are mud and uncovered.

Play continues in the rain. Come rain or shine, play will continue.

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Tennis, boxing, cricket and wrestling: Indian sport makes waves

India take on Brazil on Friday the 17th of September , 2010 at Chennai on hard-courts in the Davis Cup World Group playoffs.

The first day’s play features two singles matches : Thomas Bellucci versus Rohan Bopanna & Somdev Devverman versus Ricardo Mello.

Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi take on Bruno Soares and Marcelo Melo on Saturday in a crucial doubles encounter.

The reverse singles will be played on Sunday.

Suffice to say, at least two singles matches will need to be clinched for India to progress to the next round.

The weight of Indian expectations rest on Somdev’s shoulders. Bopanna is not favoured to win either of his singles.

Can Somdev pull it off? The Indian tennis fraternity certainly hope so.

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We’re too self-absorbed!

Image via Wikipedia

An interesting article by Aakar Patel as to why Indians are self-obsessed and thus poor team players!

What do you think?

I agree, to a large extent, that cricket, the Indian public’s passion, is not a true team sport.

Team sports are about understanding, a true choreography , a meeting of minds, hearts, souls translated into fluid motion, team action.

A similar thing could be said about tennis , specially the Indian Davis Cup team except for the doubles pair. And, mind you, team harmony does not mean that 2 players should be buddy-buddy. They just need to be civil and challenge each other to be better, to complement each other. Perhaps, that’s why we may never see another champion Davis Cup pair like Paes and Bhupathi come out of India for a long,long time.

But then, I guess, that’s why we are about genius and individual excellence. Not bad traits by themselves but then why in a population of over a billion do we have such few instances of them? Ah then, the excuses for this failing have been trotted out by our politicians for over 6 decades and hence I refuse to recount them here.

Just as we could never be another US or a Japan, but come on , China faces the same challenges as us, maybe even more! So why cannot we be the tiger we were meant to be? Our national animal is the tiger, after all!

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon can then have quite a different undertone! Quite a notion! But then nations are formed of notions, are they not?

Have a great weekend!

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