When Sir Dorabji Tata organized the first modern meet of Indian athletes with an eye on the 1920 Antwerp Olympic Games, he found that despite running barefoot their performance compared “well with the times done in Europe or elsewhere.” Suitably impressed, Tata personally financed three of the best runners for Antwerp, a move that in his own words “fired the ambition of the nationalist element in the city”. Eighty nine years after that wind-swept day in Pune, when Tata first dreamt of an individual Olympic gold for India, shooting prodigy Abhinav Bindra finally found the Holy Grail at the 2008 Beijing Games. As the Indian tricolor was hoisted in Beijing, the poise and pride on the bespectacled shooter’s visage spoke to a billion Indians, becoming a leit motif of gung-ho chest thumping in media commentaries and nationalist iconogr aphy. In a count r y undergoing a media revolution like no other – India now has more than fifty 24-hour satellite TV news netwo ...

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