Sport The Necessary Education
well uh
good afternoon i think we’ve heard a lot
of talks um
but well here’s mine it’s titled
the necessary education so while i am
talking just keep
this topic at the back of your mind it’s
called
the necessary education that is sport
so the educator and philosopher dr john
g higgins mentioned that
education is the ability to meet life
situations
now having said that when people ask me
what is your educational qualification
along
with my degree in commerce and my
master’s degree in business
administration
i add with great pride sports person and
olympian
and of course after representing india
at two olympic games
winning four commonwealth games medals
16 national titles in 17 years and
retiring
undefeated as india’s number one player
i can say with great conviction
that a lot of my education came along
this journey
well while we all share this world that
we live in
i think our life situations are unique
to each one of us
and i believe
our past was when really when the world
was seemingly
static and stationary well our present
is almost where the world is spinning
almost
desperate to throw us off well what is
our future going to look like
i believe our future is going to be even
more frantic
it’s going to be unpredictable um it’s
going to be uncertain
and it’s going to be extremely dynamic
we’re actually bracing ourselves for a
time
where we are speculating what are the
kind of skills
um what are the kind of education that’s
going to be required
to meet jobs that haven’t been invented
yet
in on a planet that might or might not
survive
right so we have never been more scared
and unprepared in our lives
now this is clear that the winds of
change
are upon us they are about us so how are
we going to go about combating this
change
well the first thing that comes to mind
is education right
um and we’re from india when we say
education we typically think of
academics
um of course this in india
means you know stuffing the kids heads
with
a lot of material a lot of knowledge um
in a seemingly systematic
manner well that’s not all today we’re
also looking at
conquering the queues by which i mean
not not the ones that we curse at
airports or the invisible ones we find
ourselves in at government offices
it’s really the iq the intelligence
quotient
it’s the eq the emotional quotient it’s
the pq
the physical quotient and it’s the aq
that’s been added now the adaptability
quotient and of course the
sq the spirituality quotient so some of
us might prefer to
know it as the social media quotient
right
so we’re all looking for solutions um
you know to find
our way in in this ever frantic world
for me i found a lot of the solutions
through sport and around the sports
arena
for me sport taught me less about
winning
and more about living so let me tell you
um i was a very stubborn systematic
um you know sort of individualistic sort
of person who was very averse to change
the only way i would accept change is if
you told me at the end of it
nothing would be altered or different
right
i was also this extremely shy person
who could not even make a reservation
a table reservation at a restaurant even
if it was over the phone
however then sport happened
and things changed and i’ll that’s the
story i want to share with you
this afternoon so
on my 16th birthday when my parents
asked me what i wanted as a gift
i actually told them i wanted to move
from mumbai
to the southern city of bengaluru to
pursue my badminton training now
this was at a time when girls didn’t
leave
home at such a young age but seeing my
passion for the sport my
parents agreed i came to bangalore for
the first time stayed
without my parents everything was new
the people the weather the food
when i was in mumbai i couldn’t get up
with an alarm clock now
in bangalore i wasn’t ever late for 4 am
training session
i changed my mode of warm-up it actually
involved me pushing my two-wheeler
vehicle up the windsor manor slope for
those who know that area of bangalore
because it just didn’t have enough power
to see me to the top
so that was my warm-up going to my
practice sessions
and and then thereafter i shifted to a
government
training center after that where again
it was a different world
very basic hostile accommodation
diet was cold food with semi-cooked
chapatis
there were a lot of creatures around
because it was quite a wild area
we’ve seen snakes in the badminton hall
and of course the playing conditions
which was the most important were
challenging as well because the
badminton court match were torn
a lot of times we were told to practice
when there were no shuttlecocks
available
so um i think you know as i went on in
my career there was a lot more adapting
to do
but i did it because of my love for the
sport
i found the strength i found the
determination i found the willingness
and i really found the bent of mind to
accept
and adapt to situations
well we come to this time in 1996
when i was in denmark and i secured a
silver medal at the world junior
championships
that was being the first indian to do so
now when i came back from denmark after
training uh
my first training session i was
obviously walling onto court at this
heady championy sort of feeling
and um yeah i was playing carefree i was
playing careless
uh just to be summoned out or caught
by my coach who said what’s going on the
tournament’s over
get your focus back play seriously or
sit out
all that elation just evaporated right
then and there
then there was this time uh when i
almost missed out on
a commonwealth games medal due to the
carelessness of my team staff
who actually informed me that my
quarterfinal match was actually
in the evening when it was scheduled in
the morning
um it was a good it was my good fortune
that my father actually called me on the
dormitory land line
where he was staying to wish me luck and
that’s when i realized that my match was
scheduled to start in an hour
now i had not prepared my kit bag wasn’t
packed
no breakfast i had no sense of timing of
the shuttle bus to take me to the
tournament venue
which was almost 45 minutes away and
i will never forget that level of
emotion
i was angry i was nervous
i was feeling let down almost cheated
in a way also feeling very determined
um to actually you know get over the
situation
somehow i got to the tournament venue in
time
without any warm-up got on court won the
match
and secured a medal for india and
[Applause]
thank you and um i think it was just the
fact that i could keep my wits about me
in in this situation where the emotions
were running so high
and um you know today we see success
failures
detours some on our own account and some
on the account of others
they will ebb and flow but it’s very
important that the balance has to come
from within
you have to stay neutral
well of course carrying these lessons
along year on year
i managed to retain um my senior
national title
um and this really came
amongst various situations right
first of all the format of the game
changed as i was playing
then we had different opponents who had
different strategies
you know i had the pressure of being the
underdog at certain times being the
favorite at others
and um you know at a time where you know
we’ve
dealt with opponents who were blatantly
cheating
uh sometimes being so unwell that i
couldn’t even sustain a pre-match
warm-up
but you still managed to go on and win
and at the end of it all
i did win my nine consecutive senior
national singles titles
um in a row equaling the record of my
mentor an idol
the legendary padmashi prakash parkour
so through all this it was really about
chasing excellence i was my own
competition i wanted to be better than i
was yesterday
and it was really about approaching
excellence
with a touch of my own creativity
well and then more change happened i
um actually forced change upon myself
got myself
out of my comfort zone now i had a lot
more talking to do
right i had to talk right from
the washer man to the airline staff to
the queen of england even who we met
at an event during the commonwealth
games
once i became a little more comfortable
speaking for me
the early days speaking to more than two
people at the same time was a crowd
well things had changed also being a
very individualistic person
i had to play on a lot of teams as i was
representing india
so the team spirit was extremely
important
and then a year before
my last nationals that i played my wrist
had become
extremely painful in fact the doctors
couldn’t diagnose it well enough
which means they couldn’t treat it well
enough
my wrist had become so painful that at
times i couldn’t even hold up a cup of
tea or a toothbrush even
and it was this when i realized the
importance of my squad
by which i mean my parents and my family
who were far away from me
but they made things comfortable for me
and kept my motivation
high my friends in the hostel who in
fact helped me with the daily chores
they drove me to
practice sessions and back they set up
my weights
in the gym they even comb my hair
on certain situ in on certain occasions
and then of course there was my coach
who reject my entire training schedule
because by then i was able to practice
only one session in a week
my physio in fact went out of her way to
research
different ways of healing me and i
clearly remember the last session before
my tournament started she said
you know i don’t think you’re going to
be able to play this tournament
well not only did i play the tournament
but i actually won it
setting the record
you know it’s a mystery how that
happened
um because the pain and the acute pain
in fact came back the very next day
but it’s that time when i realized that
anything is possible if you work in a
team
and in today’s day and age where
expectations where
pressures and competition is so high
it’s just going to be an advantage if we
learn
to actually work together and
collaborate and you actually have people
supporting you right from your core
squad to your community and beyond
that’s always going to be an advantage
right um so we all know that sports
is unscripted things change very fast in
sport and they’re constantly changing
right
so just to give you an example the
typical reaction time
in badminton is between 0.2 to 0.3
seconds
and we’ve seen smash speeds going as far
as
um 420 kilometers per hour
just to compare tennis six foot ten
american
ace john isner has hit um a
serve at about 253 kilometers per shoe
about the bretli bowl at 161 kilometers
per hour
having said this um you know
we sports people have learned to be
mindful because when an object is coming
at you at these speeds there’s not much
else that you can think about
well but you need to do a lot of
thinking because you need to take the
right decision at the right time and
then have your muscles react with your
mind
let me tell you where this quality once
played out so i was taking my then seven
month old daughter out for a stroll um
in the lane
behind our apartment and uh my house
helps two children age five and seven
they joined us and
as we were walking we saw this huge dog
coming charging at us i literally froze
but in that fraction of a second i
actually pushed the two older kids into
a bungalow compound to my right and
yelled at them to shut the gate
i didn’t have enough time to push the
stroller through so i turned the
stroller
in such a way that my daughter’s face
was facing
the bushes and couldn’t be seen now i
stood exposed but it was okay as long as
the kids were safe
i could have handled the situation it
was just luckily that at that point the
car drove into the lane and the dog got
distracted and stopped bounding
and now when i look back i think it was
just this quality of being mindful of
being
alert of the present situation of
actually taking the right decision under
pressure
that really helped me right
um yeah so they say education is not
merely the accumulation of knowledge
but is the formation of character
and i believe that
through my journey um i retired in 2006
which was hard uh hard enough but that
when i came back to mumbai to
home i realized my maternal grandmother
was very terminally ill
i got three months to spend with her
before she passed away it was also a
time i suffered a relationship breakup
and also realized that my dad’s business
had hit rock bottom
now it was very easy for me to feel
bitter about the situation because
considering the
current achievements and advancements in
sport
the fame and money that i had earned
then
wasn’t good enough um i looked around i
saw friends
in corporate jobs um i saw them in
interesting professions
and you know i i just didn’t know what
to do because
um i i seemed i felt helpless and
felt all the sacrifice and all the hard
work and everything had gone to waste
but it was not so because i turned to
the lessons that i’d learned from sport
to keep me going right
and i believe till today these are
the traits and the lessons that have
helped me
and and carried me through so
when i think back my life situation
which started
from having a single-minded focus on the
sport of badminton
to then winning nine consecutive
national singles titles
to now being a single mom i think these
are really the character traits that
have helped me
and helped me in good stead and i
believe
that if me can then
you can do right um
yes the world is changing things are
extremely dynamic
but it’s really not the skills that are
going to hold us in good stead going
forward
but the character traits that we learn
along our journey
one might argue and say that you these
character traits can be developed in a
non-sporting atmosphere
well perhaps they can but i feel that
there’s perhaps no
one forum that can teach you all this
together
and naturally and give you constant
opportunities to learn and put it to
practice
so while we’re talking about education
while we cannot con control the external
factors we can control what’s within
let us have an education that helps us
develop
inside out and in today’s world
that is the necessary education that
we’re talking about
and that necessary education is sport
thank you so much