"Can". Three letter word. He doesn't have a great personality. Slang for toilet. Painted by Andy Warhol. Worth five points in Scrabble. Then you look again. “Can” has muscles. It means having the ability, the ability, the belief. It's knowing "how to do it". It has the "power to". It is worth more points than you can estimate in competition. “Can” is what Abhinav Bindra, an outspoken guy with a sense of irony, helps India with. He is not the first to dismantle barriers because even in the 1920s and 1930s an army officer called Dhyan Chand and his friends called Leslie Hammond, Feroze Khan and Jaipal Singh Munda were telling the world that India could do some magic with the stick ball. But Bindra, with the heartbeat of an undertaker and the determination of an assassin, wins India's first individual Olympic gold in 2008, and should be hung in a sports museum as evidence by tape. This the Indians can. But to understand “can,” you must first encounter “can’t.” I have to look back on a century of struggle or as long as it takes. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay. I have to remember all the baggage of doubts that the athletes had to carry. I must remember all those who tried, who couldn't do better, who were intimidated but who fought, who didn't have a story to wear as armour, who lived in a pre-Google India, when training programs 400 meters could not simply be downloaded from the Internet and so Milkha Singh had to go and meet Charles Jenkins, the world's best 400 meters runner, at the 1956 Olympics and through an interpreter, in broken English, ask for his training schedule . And he understood it. One sultry morning in 2018, Rahul Dravid sat in his garden, as unyielding as the trees that form a canopy, and talked about little things. All the little pieces that make up a culture, that change an athletic people, that bring confidence, that create a world of "can." His sons were around, and the eldest, Samit, plays cricket and when he wants a bat, he asks for an SG. Made in India. Meerut, to be precise, in the northern heart of chaotic Uttar Pradesh, where even cricketers from overseas come to get their bats. At first glance, this seems irrelevant, but bats once came mainly from England. Names like Gray-Nicolls and Duncan Fearnley, names you said with appropriate respect. Phoren maal, bhai. These were superior bats and so, by inference, so were their cricketers. Faith comes in small pieces, like 3,000-piece puzzles put together over time. The smallest thing is a valuable piece. Young cricketers of a millennial generation have agents and plan their professional careers, but in the past, a single call from a sponsor had a meaning beyond money. "If Reebok sponsored you," Dravid says, "it was important. It meant they believed in you. It meant I had to be good." But until players and teams pick up all those pieces, inferiority is an easy coat to wear. My God, Dravid remembers thinking after seeing the exercises that South Africans did in the 90s, how far ahead are they? How can we? People chuckle now, those boys were so dhila, so soft, but this was not an India of cricketers with designer dark glasses and seven credit cards walking into English hotels as if they owned them and actually could. This was another India, less brazen, still finding its security, its place, its voice, and so many of us who went abroad in the 80s worethat hesitation of those who have not traveled and those who are insecure, armed with our thin packets of precious traveller's cheques. , sambar packets as a rescue, unsure of our accents, we ask if “veg milega?” (Is vegetarian food available?), dressed in old clothes from some fashion cycle, walking through the shops of Oxford Street in a dazzled daze. Athletes reflect the society they live in and, in those years, they too were discouraged. They looked at everyone else's fancy equipment, gyms, facilities, trainers, sneakers and tracksuits while eating a scientifically approved diet of McDonald's burgers because it was the cheapest place to eat and they confined themselves indoors. Trust is all curled up. How can you beat them if you don't belong? If sport is played in the mind, that is also where the suspicion of one's talent lies. The Indians, however, were not conditioned to voice their ambitions. No one wanted to look too big for boots they didn't even have. Well, not the nice ones their friends sometimes received from abroad. On the plane to England in 1996 for his first Test tour, Dravid was all fresh with enthusiasm and thinking about whether a series could be won, until a senior, bringing the wisdom of practice, said: "Let's try to win a Test." .Remember the Titans is a film about the semi-miraculous, this was the truly modest world of the Indian athlete. It's not that Asian athletes couldn't win medals at the Commonwealth Games or score centuries at Lord's, but they were understandably inhibited at crucial moments. "In sport," Dravid explained, "the margins are so small that any inferiority is magnified under pressure. And so, if things got tough, then we didn't have enough history behind us to prove we could do it." we cannot calculate, a weight we cannot measure, an effect impossible to estimate. Bindra, at 18, goes to America to train at the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and his education is not only about position but also psychology. Till then India had won eight Olympic golds, all in hockey; America has had more than a thousand golds and hundreds of heroes and it's as if the world of sport was there just to be conquered. This place was the Kingdom of Can and in Bindra's book, A Shot At History, he describes it: "Trust was like a birthright here and they approached the Games without the cynicism whose fumes athletes are forced to inhale every day in Indian sports. Americans really believe that they are the best and luckiest country. They were not going to the Olympics bringing amazement and satisfaction just to try, they were going to the Olympics to succeed, to make history, to be remembered collectively, and I was amazed. from the importance they gave to the team and its construction. Great athletes were scattered in the corridors. Hey, here's Apollo Ohno, the legendary skater, there's Matthew Emmons, the future Olympic hero, here's the youngest, still in affirmation phase, Michael Phelps. Their vitality amazed me and, more importantly, infected me through a sort of osmotic effect. If you train with them and beat them, the discovery is beautiful and immediate: I can be great too. "India had some of its history, some legends, some advanced scouts. But no one had won individual Olympic gold, no road had been cleared, no culture of 'power' created. People also said this writer: one billion people, no individual gold medals? For the Indians it was a terrible lament and for the foreigners a useful insult, but in truth, in a nation in difficulty and full of difficulties, where space was scarce, fields few , the coachesrare, sports science in its infancy, essential academics, disapproving parents, how many people could actually play sports and then play it competitively? It was always very far from a billion. It was not just the insufficient structures and role models, but also the lack of Indian commitment. Insecurity often turned into apathy. At home, people made fun of athletes for going to major Games to shop and it was unfair, cynical, but not entirely untrue. Badminton star Pullela Gopichand, a driven man who could have been a stern and respectful sergeant major. a previous life, he says, directly: "Many teams (of the past) were not in tune with what was happening in the world of sports. They were happy to be there, taking photographs and exchanging pins. Tons of people wanted to go to the graduation ceremonies opening and closing and now you have to push people to stay for the closing ceremony. "The athletes had earned their way there, but some saw no greater value than participation. The victory – and this was not without meaning – was in achieving this result. "Five or ten percent then," Gopichand said, "really thought they would win a medal. Now about 90 percent are doing everything they can to win a medal. Maybe they won't win a medal, but everyone is disappointed about didn't do it." . "Athletes once shrugged their shoulders after defeat, now they suffer. Awe needs a few visits to erase. The first time you go to Lord's or Wimbledon you can be immobilized by history. All those tables, those statues, those names, that legend The second time around, you might recognize that the wickets even at Lord's are just 22 meters apart and the net at Wimbledon is the same height as your local club in Chennai But once upon a time, Gopichand says, athletes hardly travelled, perhaps two tournaments a year abroad, maybe four, and it wasn't enough to find the necessary comfort, to understand that the poster on the wall was not a hooded hero but just another nervous human being Gopichand said: “The people there idolized so much that they couldn't beat them." But there were always exceptions. Always people like Sunil Gavaskar, Ramanathan Krishnan, Prakash Padukone, Michael Ferreira, always exceptions whose desire dampened fear, whose drive prevailed over insecurity . Who forgets Gavaskar against West Indies teaching us the difference between height and stature? Who forgets Padukone and her wrist stitched together with silk thread? They are not as afraid as others. Why you weren't intimidated, I asked Gopichand, the 2001 All-England champion, and he replied: "I blindly believed I would win. I just didn't like losing, it didn't matter who it was. For me it was personal on the pitch ". These people are the ones who lead the way, find the way, give courage, restore confidence. This is also who Bindra is. Forget all those horrible "do-it-yourself-for-India" clichés, because the athlete can only think of himself. Under the pressure of competition, it is difficult enough to push forward one's talent, let alone drag the nations along. You don't play with a hymn in your head but according to the score which is your program for the day. But when you win, for yourself, for your parents, for your coaches, for those who helped you, the medal becomes an involuntary gift for your nation. Bindra doesn't look at his 2008 Olympic gold medal and much of the time isn't even sure where it is. But the medal is truly an object to behold for India, a circular representation of the journey it has experienced and endured for years. A trial medallion. An Indian can. Bindra is not a star because ishooters they never are. He's too quiet to be a celebrity, too serious to be casual. But he is something more important: he is an evangelist. Not for shooting but for suffering, not for gold medals but for holding a dream in your fist and never letting it go. He is a private man with a great story who eventually learned to stand on the podium and tell strangers incredibly honest stories about what he was missing. Bindra's great gift is to demystify success and strip it of exaggeration. "Sometimes, when you achieve a great achievement," he said, "there can be an element of aura or excessive admiration that is counterproductive. It diminishes the deep desperation to win and the desire to achieve it for oneself." He wants to prove that he is within himself. brought, a true aspiration of imperfect men, not an empty and useless miracle. When he began to speak for the first time after Beijing 2008, called by schools, conclaves, colleges, corporations, he did not talk much about his weaknesses because he was still a competitive athlete who needed to maintain a strong self-image and therefore was not able to reveal themselves completely. But then, as his career ended, he started stripping down, shedding his skin and showing people all of himself. "I talked about my vulnerabilities. I talked about my insecurities. I talked about how I was a nervous wreck. I talked about how I was a perfectionist for whom nothing was ever enough. I was like everyone else and I just worked, worked, worked. I persevered." Even when he met athletes, it was because his vulnerabilities reassured them. Oh, wait, he's just like us. "I tell them I'm an average athlete who won because of his damn mentality. If I can do it, there's no reason why you can't do it." And while the athletes became passionate about him, bonded with him now this umbilical cord of shared suffering, they opened up to him, they exposed themselves and revealed their doubts and right there, in the rawness of their discussion, something was being built, something new, something honest, something lasting. Strange things happen to humans when one of their kind opens a door. It's as if all the awe of a nation comes out. In 1998, legendary South Korean golfer Se Ri Pak, whose father left her in a cemetery at night to learn to deal with fear, won the first women's golf major by a South Korean. Since then 13 different South Korean women have won 23 women's majors Two decades earlier, that head-bandaged Viking with an aversion to Wimbledon razors, called Bjorn Borg, brought Swedish impassivity to tennis. He won 11 Grand Slam titles from 1974 to 1981 and spawned myths (heart rate 35?), legends and a respectful lineage of heirs named Mats Wilander, Stefan Edberg, Anders Järryd, Joakim. Nyström and Henrik Sundström. “We saw the success he had,” Wilander once said, “and we decided to copy his style.” There's no need to say anything else. In India, around 200 shooters took part in the Nationals in the 1990s. Now there are 7000. Let's credit even a small percentage of that growth to Bindra. His influence is hard to measure, but he speaks as calmly as he does. It does not reverberate across the Indian landscape like the cricket victory, but seeps into shooting ranges and the subconscious as it changes Olympic tables, record books, beliefs, dreams. His very ordinariness from the outside - clean boy with his shirt rolled up, of medium height, with glasses, no obvious muscles - is a gift and a human reassurance. No god could look like this. He is an introverted man who makes himself available, a terribly demanding competitor and generous with his time, as they must.