It is participation that counts... yeah right!

About four years back, when I was in B-school, a classmate of mine did a class paper on relationship between populations, economic factors to Olympic medals. The outlier in his analysis was India, which has a large population, and decent PPP GDP. This analysis pretty much confirms it.

There is certainly a lot to cheer about India's performance. For the first time an Indian won an Olympic gold in an individual event. And, Indian performance in the 2008 Beijing Olympics bettered its performance in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. 56 years is an awful long time. The lessons from Beijing are clear - In India, it is better to get the government out of the way to make progress. Unlike China, Indian government has an impeccable record of screwing up things. Take the case of field hockey. The team did not even make it to the Olympics. Of course, that did not stop them from sending four coaches to Beijing to "observe."

Let us hope that good sense prevail, the Government gets out of the way, the corporations and media step in to create a better talent pool and Abhinav Bindra remains a player in shooting and not a player in politics as a member of Rajya Sabha. Being nominated to Rajya Sabha is no honor for someone like Bindra. It will do good for everyone to remember that... "We are all fools, in different subjects."