Skip to main content

Numero Uno(the hindu)

For a country starved of successes at the individual level in world sport, Saina Nehwal’s feat of becoming the first Indian woman shuttler to reach the No.1 position in the world is a stupendous achievement. The 25-year-old Nehwal — a resident of Hyderabad — achieved this mark during the course of the 2015 India Open Super Series badminton tournament. Nehwal eventually won, defeating former world champion
Ratchanok Intanon of Thailand. Amidst the collective disappointment in the cricket-mad country following India’s loss to Australia in the World Cup, Nehwal’s mark has offered a moment of immense pride and delight for Indian sports-lovers. Very few Indians have reached the pinnacle of individual sports. In badminton, only Prakash Padukone had reached the No.1 mark, more than three decades ago. Nehwal now occupies a distinguished position in Indian sport along with achievers such as chess grandmaster Viswanathan Anand and boxer Mary Kom, both of whom reached the top positions in the respective individual sports.
Nehwal’s ascent was aided by the fact that the reigning Olympic badminton champion, Li Xuerui from China, sustained an injury and has played sparingly in the past few months. It is Nehwal’s persistent competitiveness that has allowed her to remain in the top echelons of her sport, and helped her reach the summit at an opportune time. She had won five major tournaments since 2014 — the Indian Open Grand Prix twice, the Australian Super Series and the China Open in 2014, and the India Super Series in 2015. Credit must also go to Nehwal’s coaches over the years, who include Dronacharya award winner Syed Arif, badminton legend Pullela Gopichand and the present coach Vimal Kumar, who is also a former Indian champion. As with other Indian sportspersons — Viswanathan Anand in particular — Nehwal’s success could spur other Indians to take a liking to that sport and inspire them to seek competitive pursuits. The lack of adequate sporting infrastructure, the general absence of a sporting culture, and the domination of cricket in media coverage of sports in the country have meant that Indian achievements in individual sports are few and far between. Here is hoping that such triumphs as Nehwal’s are not flashes in the pan but the start of a trend of strong competitiveness among individual sportspersons, at least in badminton. The victory of male shuttler K. Srikanth in the same tournament — which lifted his world ranking to No.4 — suggests there is indeed something strong brewing in Indian badminton.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

SC asks Centre to strike a balance on Rohingya issue (.hindu)

Supreme Court orally indicates that the government should not deport Rohingya “now” as the Centre prevails over it to not record any such views in its formal order, citing “international ramifications”. The Supreme Court on Friday came close to ordering the government not to deport the Rohingya. It finally settled on merely observing that a balance should be struck between humanitarian concern for the community and the country's national security and economic interests. The court was hearing a bunch of petitions, one filed by persons within the Rohingya community, against a proposed move to deport over 40,000 Rohingya refugees. A three-judge Bench, led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, began by orally indicating that the government should not deport Rohingya “now”, but the government prevailed on the court to not pass any formal order, citing “international ramifications”. With this, the status quo continues even though the court gave the community liberty to approach i...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »

"ISRO has capabilities to build geostationary satellites for air quality monitoring” (downtoearth)

Pawan Gupta's findings on trans-boundary movement of pollution (Punjab to Delhi) from biomass burning in 2015 spurred debates. He participated in discussions with Indian regulators early September at the Better Air Quality Conference in Busan on the advantages of using satellite data for air quality monitoring. He explains to Down to Earth how air quality monitoring is done using satellite data. How is satellite data used to measure air pollution? Satellites that provide information on atmospheric pollutants are normally (not always) in the low earth orbits (400-1000 km above the Earth’s surface). A single satellite can carry one or more remote sensing instruments onboard that look down to earth and obtain information about the object in the field of view of satellite sensor. The Earth receives electromagnetic radiation from the sun, which travels through space and reaches the earth-atmosphere system. The radiation then interacts with the Earth’s atmosphere and the surface...
1 comment
Click Here To Read more »

What's ailing Namami Gange programme?(DTE)

Winters are extremely hectic for Sushma Patel, a vegetable grower in Uttar Pradesh’s Chunar town. Her farm is in the fertile plains of Ganga where people grow three crops a year. But this is the only season when she can grow vegetables. And before that, she needs to manually dig out shreds of plastic and wrappers from her one-hectare (ha) farm. “This is all because of the nullah,” she says, pointing at an open drain that runs through her field, carrying sewage from the neighbourhood to the Ganga. “Every monsoon, the drain overflows and inundates the field with a thick, black sludge and plastic debris. We cannot even go near the field as the stench of sewage fills the air,” she says. But Patel has no one to complain to as this is the way of life for most people in this ancient town. About 70 per cent of the people in Chunar depend on toilets that have on-site sanitation, such as septic tanks and pits. In the absence of a proper disposal or management system, people simply dump the faec...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »