top of page

By:

Bhalchandra Chorghade

11 August 2025 at 1:54:18 pm

Applause for Cricket, Silence for Badminton

Mumbai: When Lakshya Sen walked off the court after the final of the All England Badminton Championships, he carried with him the disappointment of another near miss. The Indian shuttler went down in straight games to Lin Chun-Yi, who created history by becoming the first player from Chinese Taipei to lift the prestigious title. But the story of Lakshya Sen’s defeat is not merely about badminton final. It is also about the contrasting way India celebrates its sporting heroes. Had the same...

Applause for Cricket, Silence for Badminton

Mumbai: When Lakshya Sen walked off the court after the final of the All England Badminton Championships, he carried with him the disappointment of another near miss. The Indian shuttler went down in straight games to Lin Chun-Yi, who created history by becoming the first player from Chinese Taipei to lift the prestigious title. But the story of Lakshya Sen’s defeat is not merely about badminton final. It is also about the contrasting way India celebrates its sporting heroes. Had the same narrative unfolded on a cricket field, the reaction would have been dramatically different. In cricket, even defeat often becomes a story of heroism. A hard-fought loss by the Indian team can dominate television debates, fill newspaper columns and trend across social media for days. A player who narrowly misses a milestone is still hailed for his fighting spirit. The nation rallies around its cricketers not only in victory but also in defeat. The narrative quickly shifts from the result to the effort -- the resilience shown, the fight put up, the promise of future triumph. This emotional investment is one of the reasons cricket enjoys unparalleled popularity in India. It has built a culture where players become household names and their performances, good or bad, become part of the national conversation. Badminton Fights Contrast that with what happens in sports like badminton. Reaching the final of the All England Championships is a monumental achievement. The tournament is widely considered badminton’s equivalent of Wimbledon in prestige and tradition. Only the very best players manage to reach its final stages, and doing it twice speaks volumes about Lakshya Sen’s ability and consistency. Yet the reaction in India remained largely subdued. There were congratulatory posts, some headlines acknowledging the effort and brief discussions among badminton enthusiasts. But the level of national engagement never quite matched the magnitude of the achievement. In a cricketing context, reaching such a stage would have triggered days of celebration and analysis. In badminton, it often becomes just another sports update. Long Wait India’s wait for an All England champion continues. The last Indian to win the title was Pullela Gopichand in 2001. Before him, Prakash Padukone had scripted history in 1980. These victories remain among the most significant milestones in Indian badminton. And yet, unlike cricketing triumphs that are frequently revisited and celebrated, such achievements rarely stay in the mainstream sporting conversation for long. Lakshya Sen’s journey to the final should ideally have been viewed as a continuation of that legacy, a reminder that India still possesses the talent to challenge the world’s best in badminton. Instead, it risks fading quickly from public memory. Visibility Gap The difference ultimately comes down to visibility and cultural investment. Cricket in India is not merely a sport; it is an ecosystem built over decades through media attention, sponsorship, and mass emotional attachment. Individual sports, on the other hand, often rely on momentary bursts of recognition, usually during Olympic years or when a medal is won. But consistent performers like Lakshya Sen rarely receive the sustained spotlight that their achievements deserve. This disparity can also influence the next generation. Young athletes are naturally drawn to sports where success brings recognition, financial stability and national fame. When one sport monopolises the spotlight, others struggle to build similar appeal. Beyond Result Lakshya Sen may have finished runner-up again, but his performance at the All England Championship is a reminder that India continues to produce world-class athletes in disciplines beyond cricket. The real issue is not that cricket receives immense attention -- it deserves the admiration it gets. The concern is that athletes from other sports often do not receive comparable appreciation for achievements that are equally significant in their own arenas. If India aspires to become a truly global sporting nation, its applause must grow broader. Sporting pride cannot remain confined to one field. Because somewhere on a badminton court, an athlete like Lakshya Sen is fighting just as hard for the country’s colours as any cricketer on a packed stadium pitch. The only difference is how loudly the nation chooses to cheer.

The Death Cult of Hamas

Updated: Feb 24, 2025

The recent parading of the remains of four Israeli hostages was yet another ugly reminder of the manner in which the terrorist organization has weaponized everything.

Hamas

On a grim Thursday morning in Gaza, Hamas unveiled its latest act of macabre theater by ceremonially parading the remains of four Jewish hostages including those of Oded Lifshitz and the Bibas family who were abducted during the October 7 Massacre. Before a jeering crowd of masked militiamen and their supporters, the coffins were hoisted aloft like trophies of war, as if parading corpses could substitute for military success.


Amid a fragile truce, this was spectacle designed to humiliate Israel and cynically reinforce Hamas’ grip on its own population. Like all of Hamas’s strategies, it was as tactically foolish as it was morally bankrupt.


Hamas has always been adept at turning anything within its reach into a weapon. Bodies, both of the living and the dead, are no exception. The group’s signature innovation in the Second Intifada was the suicide bomber, transforming young men and women into human projectiles for mass murder. In Gaza, civilians have long been repurposed as human shields, positioned strategically around Hamas’s command centers, ammunition stockpiles, and tunnel networks. When those civilians die, whether by Israeli airstrikes or Hamas’s own errant rockets, their bodies are used again as ‘props’ in the theater of international sympathy.


It is a tragic irony that the very same weapons Hamas wields so indiscriminately often backfire on the very Palestinians it claims to defend. In October 2023, the IDF reported that one in five Hamas rockets landed inside Gaza. Only last week, a 14-year-old Palestinian boy was killed by a misfired Gazan rocket. But such details never deter Hamas from the same nihilistic strategy. Its leaders, ensconced in Qatar, are far removed from the daily devastation they orchestrate. Their calculus remains unchanged for Palestinian suffering, so long as it serves their broader narrative, is a price worth paying.


In a remarkable feat of ideological contortion, significant sections of the global Left continue to lend it credence, rationalizing its atrocities as an ‘anti-colonial struggle.’ For them, the October 7, 2023 massacre of Israeli civilians was not an act of unprovoked savagery but an ‘understandable’ response to Israeli occupation.


This moral relativism is particularly bizarre given that Hamas’s own ideology is deeply at odds with the progressive values these leftists claim to champion. Women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, secular governance - none of these exist under Hamas rule. And yet, from university campuses to social media feeds, the slogan “From the river to the sea” is parroted uncritically, with little acknowledgment of what it actually calls for - the extinction of Israel and its people.


The Thursday morning parade of coffins was not just an act of psychological warfare against Israel but a desperate attempt to rally a war-weary Palestinian population that has borne the brunt of Hamas’s disastrous leadership. The spectacle was intended to distract from the staggering losses of the past fifteen months - thousands of Hamas fighters dead, its top commanders eliminated, its military infrastructure systematically dismantled by the IDF.


Hamas sees Israel as a colonial outpost akin to French Algeria, believing that if the cost of living there becomes unbearable, the Jews will leave. The comparison is a fantasy. Israelis are not pieds-noirs with passports to distant homelands. And Hamas, by devaluing life so grotesquely, only strengthens Israeli determination to destroy it.


Meanwhile, Hamas’s supporters in the West scramble to deflect responsibility. They claim that an Israeli airstrike, not Hamas’s own hand, killed the Bibas family. The evidence is unclear, but even if true, it would not absolve Hamas of the horrors it inflicted upon the family. No Israeli airstrike forced Hamas gunmen to storm Kibbutz Nir Oz and drag a nine-month-old baby from his home. No Israeli airstrike compelled Hamas to hold civilians hostage for 500 days, using them as bargaining chips in a conflict of its own making.


Hamas’s apologists refuse to acknowledge that it is not merely resisting Israeli occupation but perpetuating a death cult that thrives on suffering.

Comments

bottom of page