Me and mine

We wouldnt be using the word nepotism from Italian nepotismo,nepote meaning nephew,and rooted in Latin nepos/ nepotem if it were not for the papal penchant for favouring nephews and relatives before the Reformation. But nepotism by any other name would still be the same. The achievement of Suresh Kalmadi amp; Co in erecting a mini monument to it is an outrageous reminder of the way sport is run in this country. As The Indian Express investigation on Tuesday revealed,the Organising Committee of the Commonwealth Games is a veritable spiders web of parents and offspring,uncles and nephews,siblings,husbands and wives.

In fact,38 top individuals have been caught in the web of relatedness. And the person heading the committee that interviewed them for the jobs has called the statistical scandal just a coincidence. The sets of related individuals number 19 surely an unprecedented,prolonged,self-repeating,elaborate coincidence. If the Organising Committee points out that all these individuals underwent the due process of applying in response to newspaper ads and then being interviewed,it blinds itself to the obverse of that due process how easily public ads and tenders become an eyewash,with the powers-that-be having already decided whose benefactors to be. Maybe the tiny local fairground lottery,where the prizes a tacky wall clock,a waste basket,or a pack of toiletries invariably go to family members of the organisers,is the most apt analogy for this fantastic play of chance. Except that we are talking of monthly salaries ranging from Rs 33,500 to lakhs in this case.

These revelations about the Organising Committee are not merely about one particular big-ticket sports event and the sharing of the spoils. They hint at something perverse. It was perhaps a Freudian slip when Union Sports Minister M.S. Gill called preparations for the CWG as being akin to a monsoon wedding,with all the arrangements expected to fall in place just in time fortuitously and festively. It surely could not have been his case that,like those monsoon weddings,our sport is organised as a family enterprise. Or could it have been?