In mid-July 2018, when this chapter had passed its many deadlines, an exchange about Indian sport on social media became, to use the parlance of mobile apps, a notification for our times. “Our” here is Indian sport – that baffling, exhilarating, frustrating and incredibly optimistic entity – and the Twitter exchange around it indicated that some conventions of strength had been dismantled. It took place soon after Hima Das launched her afterburner across the straight in the 400 meters final at the IAAF World U20 Championships (also called the World Junior Championships), becoming the first Indian to win a track gold medal in an event world. After his semi-final success, the Athletics Federation of India (AFI) had commented on a video clip of Das' trackside interview on its Twitter account saying: Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay India's athletics ruling body called a 'loser' and dragged with responses of 'shame', 'disgusting', told they should focus on scouting talent rather than teaching English and accused among other things of trying to "diminish his glory". To such a point of ferocity, that the AFI had to apologize on the social network service, doing so in Hindi. A rough translation of the apology read: “We simply wanted to show that Hima is fearless both on and off the track. Despite coming from a small village, he spoke freely to foreign media. We apologize again to those who were angry. Apologies, it should be noted, do not come easily to Indian sports federations. This would mean admitting a mistake and a responsibility to someone other than oneself. This doesn't happen enough: neither Indian sports governors admit mistakes, nor do they feel the need to take responsibility. Even though the Hindi version of the AFI's apology sounded more sardonic than sincere, there was no denying that the ruling body had been hit by the same public backlash. Ten years ago, no Indian athlete, especially one outside cricket, would have encountered such a public outcry against the treatment meted out to him by his own sports federation. What was notable about the furor over Hima Das and her fluency in English was that the support came from an unknown multitude. They pounced on AFI's condescension and twisted the narrative in a previously unexpected direction. Rather than Hima being conscious of her English from now on (the athlete herself said she was not offended and admitted that her English is "not that good"), the people behind AFI's social media were put in guard. What used to be the modus operandi towards Indian athletes (those outside the cricketosphere) by those above them in the hierarchy of authority, is now prohibited. In a decade of seismic changes in Indian sport – in the breadth of competitions, the range of success, the management of elite athletes and the variety of journalism – the involvement of the general public in an otherwise quiet world has been visible and, in many cases like Hima Das', heard aloud. Until the early years of the 21st century, greater India paid attention to these athletes once every two years, when the Olympic Games or Asian Games were held. They were recognized and celebrated by the sporting community and the media working around it, but not by the masses, nor by the country's business community. Aside from some engaging personalities, and that's itpointed out, English speakers – like Indian tennis players Leander Paes, chess master Viswanathan Anand or snooker and billiards men Michael Ferreira and Geet Sethi in the 1990s – the rest tended to be grouped together in a category considered uncool. The English-language press and media largely fueled this general trend, and although they did not have the clout of readership or viewership, they controlled the attention of the corporate ATMs available to sport. In a conversation about choosing a photograph for the cover of a national magazine, the image of Indian hockey's combustible and inspirational Dhanraj Pillay in a resplendent turban was rejected because he looked like a 'gavaar, (a yokel) and would not went down well with the magazine's English-speaking readers. The fact that most athletes came fundamentally from rural or working-class backgrounds and from homes of little financial means, in many ways influenced how their lives and stories were told to the rest of India. At that time communication also traveled in a straight line: from sport through the journalist/reporter/writer/television reporter to the reader/viewer, with the athlete's voice often found at the far end. Until the mid-1990s, sports media were newspapers and magazines and only there could you find stories about an athlete's successes or difficulties. Information about the athlete without English initially came from their coaches or officials who had control over the future of both the athlete and the coach. Athletes who wanted to tell their story were often considered difficult and problematic. In a team sport like hockey it was the stormy Pillay or the goalkeeper Ashish Ballal. Among individual athletes, it is difficult to name anyone who spoke little English and protested or questioned authority in the early 1990s. Michael Ferreira never held back with his English and the only exception to all the rules was Prakash Padukone who led a rebellion against the Badminton Association of India in 1997. Success in individual sport could provide an athlete with some attention and influence, but tended to be limited. Athlete as a free agent was a concept that did not exist in India and is only recognized today. The tribe of mostly independent individual athletes could be found in tennis, motorsports or golf: Leander Paes turned professional in 1991, Narain Karthikeyan's first racing season in the UK was in 1993, Jeev Milkha Singh started the European tour in 1998. the rest of the athletes, however, remained connected to the official superstructure around which Indian sport is built. This meant that government funding and official approval became the most basic layer of their career path. The athletes were seen, we rarely heard them. Never mind rocking the boat, even suddenly getting up on deck wasn't advisable. When I entered the profession in 1989 and was working in the then Bombay, the first narrative developed (in sports other than cricket/tennis/snooker and billiards) presented the Indian athlete as a creature with deficit. Of means, ambition, talent and the oldest of Indian chestnuts, the killer instinct. Coverage of Olympic sport, whether it be hockey with its incessant drama of coaching cliques or track and field with its flare-and-fade schemes or any other sport with its petty mistakes, has remained characterized by a condescending tolerance. News agencies and newspapers fed themselves, and continue to do so, with headlines that followed a mechanical cycle of "X leaps forward" and/or "X collapses". It was dismissive, clichéd, and lacking in detail. I remembered GeetSethi speaking about his experience as part of the Indian contingent at the 1998 Asian Games. It was the first time that Sethi, an urban management graduate from Ahmedabad, had gone to a multi-disciplinary event and he recalls witnessing what he called the “conscious attempt to eliminate the dignity of the Indian athlete. This occurred through indifference towards the needs or schedules of the athletes, the athlete-referee relationship and the treatment given to the competitors by the referees themselves. It didn't matter to remember an athlete's name, Sethi was thrown a t-shirt as a disposable "souvenir" as the contingent's tracksuits hadn't arrived in time. At the first Olympics I covered as a journalist, Athens 2004, it seemed that the media also played their unconscious part in mocking the athlete. I had to experience what the effects of that mentality felt firsthand for an athlete. On the first day of the Games, Suma Shirur made the 10m air rifle final, only the second Indian to participate in an Olympic shooting final. From a qualifying field of 44, Suma finished in the top eight. Anjali Bhagwat (the first Indian shooter to qualify for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, finishing seventh) suffered a shock exit from the qualifiers in Athens. I remember Anjali sitting with her husband Mandar on the edge of the shooting range after the qualifying rounds, distraught. Her hands were shaking. In the final in Athens, Shirur had finished eighth. What the newspapers reported the next day from news agencies said: “Suma finishes last. “When I saw Shirur a day or so later at the hockey stadium, I wanted to interview her about her experience in an Olympic final. She was furious: “Suma finishes last” was a whiplash to her spirit. For her, the media had belittled his success in reaching an Olympic final, belittled the effort it took to get there, and was not about to waste time talking to us. As the only media representative, I had no defense to offer even expressing my horrified disapproval for the title and for good intentions, so I shyly left Almost two weeks later, Anju Bobby George breaks her national record in the long jump final and when we stop her to chat in the mixed zone, she says: “I'm sorry. " he said. “Please tell everyone. " Anju was the country's foremost track and field athlete, having won India her first medal at the World Athletics Championships - a bronze in the long jump in Paris in 2003, she was a gold medalist at the Asian Games and on the biggest night of her career she had gone further than she had ever done. What was there to be sorry about? Achieve a personal best? We knew what it was and we felt miserable. It was the opposite of entitlement, the extra layer that Indian athletes seemed to be instinctively forced to wear – to be respected. That they owed us something. It felt wrong. Four years later, in Beijing in 2008, a news report broke the news that wrestler Sushil Kumar had “crashed. The wireman was unaware that repechage was being introduced at the Olympics for the first time. After a brief break following his 'crash out', Sushil won three matches in 70 minutes and India's first wrestling medal in 56 years. This unexpected bronze – the first time India had won more than one individual medal at the Olympic Games – in hindsight, it seemed like fate was involved in an unconscious act of defiance against the stereotypical narrative of Indian sport. Be careful, do your homework, the athlete said, we can no longer be considered supplicants to your telling of our history. Beijing had also brought India its first goldOlympic individual, Abhinav Bindra in the 10m air rifle. Bindra's gold was to break the barrier created by history and circumstance on what was considered possible, achievable, available in Indian sport. Every athlete from that point on has found the only standard that matters to him. The media, however, took just a little longer to catch up. On August 9, 2012, several editions of the Times of India, which should now be available on its e-papers, covered Vikas Gowda's performance in the men's discus final at the London 2012 Olympics with this headline "Gowda finishes lowly eighth" This it is the first appearance by an Indian in an Olympic athletics final in 36 years, after Sriram Singh (Montreal 1976/ 800m). Gowda was eighth out of 12 finalists and was considered low-ranking. On television during the London Games, an Olympic "expert" referred to a national hockey player as a "wild card." "It was one of the last times that the 'mainstream media' to which I belong, would be able to mock a non-cricketer in this way and get away with it without a mocking rebuke. Not in the 'comments' column of an online article or in an angry letter to the editor via email, but you'll get a direct response. In your face, so to speak. It's not just athletic progress that can be measured in Olympic cycles of our athletes can be measured during the 2016 Rio Olympics, the reaction to an off-the-cuff remark from a society columnist: “Team India's goal at the Olympics: Rio jao waste of money and opportunity.” (Go to Rio. Take selfies. Return empty-handed. ) – was proof that an old, tired narrative often repeated by sports governors to journalists could no longer work. ****The generation of athletes who grew up in post-liberalisation India were to begin becoming the first of many things: top 30 in the singles rankings on the WTA Tour, on the Formula One grid, on the professional championship squash circuit, PGA Tour, Asian medalists in gymnastics, multiple medalists in swimming. As their careers advanced into the 21st century, it was the Internet and social media that ensured that the wider public knew how to directly reach these pioneers and follow their careers. The onset of online/digital journalism, whether through formal websites, blogs, epapers, had meant that Indian sports could now be covered through forms and language without limitations of space or time, stereotypes or prejudices. Thus the story of sprinter Dutee Chand, forced to undergo a "gender test" and then banned from competing due to the high levels of testosterone in her body, could be told with rigor and sensitivity. Dutee's career was not allowed to follow the path of Pinki Pramanik, gold medalist at the Doha 2006 Asian Games, or Santhi Soundarajan who was stripped of the Doha silver medal, over gender identity issues . In 2006, Pinki and Santhi were treated like outcasts. In 2014, after Dutee was dropped from the CWG contingent for Glasgow, there were several factors that ensured her career didn't end as abruptly as Pinki's or Santhi's did: there was government support, a Canadian team willing to fight his case at the Court of Arbitration for Sport and a journalistic community that wanted to follow the case down to the smallest details. Dutee was given the oxygen he needed to continue his fight and the fight he needed to be able to run again. Regulations were frozen, Dutee competed at/.