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Thursday March 28, 2024

Roadblocks to opportunity

We know that life is not equal for all the citizens of our country. Those lucky enough to be born into wealth and influence have opportunities far greater than those of peers born in less fortunate households. The difference is so vast that the miniscule percentage at the very top

By Kamila Hyat
July 30, 2015
We know that life is not equal for all the citizens of our country. Those lucky enough to be born into wealth and influence have opportunities far greater than those of peers born in less fortunate households. The difference is so vast that the miniscule percentage at the very top of the pyramid leads life closer to their western counterparts than the people who may live just a street or two away from their own houses.
The disparity is growing and with this come many new problems. But the biggest of these is that we seem strangely less than eager to do anything about it. Even the roads which could lead to opportunity and give the impoverished or the less well off a chance in life seem to have been blocked. This has been done deliberately, callously and without a moment of thought.
Take the example of what we still call our ‘national game’ – field hockey. For the first time since 1948, or essentially since Pakistan appeared on the map of the world, the country’s hockey squad in their green blazers will not be forming a part of Pakistan’s smaller contingent for the Olympic Games at Rio De Janiero in the summer of 2016. They will not march along with the over 200 nations participating in the biggest sporting event in the world and of course they will not appear on the hockey field after being decisively knocked out of the Olympic qualifiers completed recently in Belgium.
This would have been, at one point, inconceivable. Pakistan has won all its three Olympic gold medals in hockey. It has also collected three silvers and two bronze medals in the sport. The journey is one that has brought euphoria to thousands of fans who watched these moments of glory on the victory stand. The last one came in Los Angeles in 1984.
The downhill road since then is disturbing. It comes partially because of the lack of patronage offered to any sport in the country except cricket. There are other factors involved too. The game of field hockey has changed immensely – perhaps like many other sports. But it is Pakistan which needed to resist changes in rule which went against its own playing style and adapt to others as the rest of the world has done.
We failed in this. Our condition was so appalling that earlier this year the once powerful Pakistan Hockey Federation was unable to continue the camp for the national team it has begun in Abbottabad since it lacked the funds to pay stipends or for food. A generous offer from the Indian governing body for hockey to help out was rather churlishly refused, on the basis that we would not accept help from an ‘enemy’. Instead we have become our own enemies.
Sport is not just about pushing, kicking or propelling a ball around a field, running around a track or reaching your goal through other means. It goes beyond that, offering nations an opportunity to join together in pride and build the kind of spirit that keeps countries together. For a long time, we have relied on cricket alone to provide us these moments. They come only rarely. But one reason for this is our dependence on a lone sport, in which too we falter for a variety of reasons.
We have allowed squash, a sport in which we held the world title year after year, to disappear into near oblivion, hockey to decline so rapidly that the fall resembles a drop from a plane without a parachute and have failed to build other sports even though we have immense potential to do so. The successes we saw in the 1950s on the athletics field, on the wrestling mat and far later than that in the boxing ring seem to have faded away.
There is significance in this. It reflects for one the way we perceive ourselves as a people. Surveys indicate that parents in the Subcontinent believe that academic and then professional success is key to their children’s lives. This is not untrue. But there is also a need for balance. Western societies tend to put happiness first on the scale; the Chinese good health while other communities place different values on what they see as the most crucial elements on life.
From time to time, we make what seems a step in the right direction. The Punjab Sports Board recently announced that it wished to activate all playing fields at government schools and make physical education a compulsory subject. Many of the schools run in the public sector have open space which remains unutilised since there are no facilities to teach a sport or offer children the equipment they need for it. Girls of course have even fewer opportunities than boys. If the PSB could deliver even partially on its promise, this would be a revolutionary change in a country from several points of view.
Sports, unlike most other fields of life, offer an equality of opportunity in the sense that someone from a less privileged background can excel as much as one whose family has wealth and influence. Pakistan cricket, and at one time hockey as well as squash, provides plenty of examples of persons from both ends of the social spectrum coming together on the same field to create a strong unit able to take on others. With the decline in sports, we have taken away this rung in the ladder to change for the poor. The rich can of course climb it by opting for academics or expensive coaching which can lead them to sporting success at various levels.
Examples come in from countries around the world. In Brazil, sporting programmes, mainly centred around the national game of football, have been set up by former players, the government, philanthropic organisations and other bodies as a means to pull children off the streets, away from drugs and other vices and draw them into a healthy pastime which can also offer them confidence, pride and possibly some chance at making money. It is not necessary to be a superb footballer to do so. Children from these programmes go on to become coaches, run the programmes themselves, replicate them in other places or simply acquire the sense of direction they need to make something of their lives.
In our country, we have strangely devalued sports. At schools and within homes, children are often discouraged from playing, on the basis that academic success is all that matters. Of course academics are important; of course all our children deserve a chance, an opportunity to acquire a quality education. But they also deserve the right to play, and to develop their skills on the fields and sporting halls which should be present in far more places than is the case right now.
The run-down state of the facilities that exist demonstrates how little we care about this. Sport receives one of the lowest allocations for any sector in the national budget. This of course is the reason why we have fallen so far behind in most of the sports in which we once showed promise and why the national flag no longer proudly flutters behind the victory stand at venues around the globe.
The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor.
Email: kamilahyat@hotmail.com