My Open Letter To The PM of India

Dear Mr Narendra Modi,

I write to you as an athlete of the country you lead and have been elected to better.

Amidst the hysteria around the football World Cup, a news channel broke the story of a few MLA's who were going to Brazil to watch the World Cup under the pretext that they needed to see how an event as big as the this was being managed. A day later, after much public outrage, this junket was scrapped and the ministers cancelled their trip!

I have been a swimmer for the majority of my life, represented my country abroad for over 15 years and have no connection to the game of football. However, when I saw this story unfold on television it brought feelings of nothing but anger and frustration, disgust and regret that I did not speak up earlier!

Let me say first off, that my experience of the two National Games at Hyderabad and Assam, was that they were managed and organised extremely well! Therefore this justification of needing to watch the World Cup to learn how an event is conducted does not seem believable, specially when no such event is planned for India at present, other than the IPL which is anyway spectacularly managed.

That being said, this incident makes me want to share two instances to draw your attention to the sad and disgusting state of affairs in our country written from an athletes point of view!

Golf Diaries - Scotland

Some moments in life are so dear that we end up cherishing them, holding them close to our hearts, and no matter what life throws at us in our most trying times, their memory brings a smile to our faces.

A month back, my family and I had the good fortune of taking time off together for a ten day break in London and Scotland. Obsessed as I am with my golf and training, I was dying to play the courses at both places.

Golf in London did not happen and that drove me crazy. How did I compensate? I let London and its people see a ridiculously eccentric side of me, executing imaginary swings and doing shadow practice in the most unlikely of spaces...well, everywhere I went really, from hotels and restaurants to the Big Ben and the National Art Gallery!

At the National Art Gallery, London.

Scotland was next and I was really hoping I'd get to play there. It had been ten days since I had last trained and this was probably the longest I had gone without hitting a golf ball in the last two years! 

The Gods gave in as we arrived at a lovely place called Wick, in Scotland. We checked in at this awesome castle-turned-hotel-on-a-cliff-by-the-sea made only more spectacular by the fact that it was minutes away from the Wick Golf Club, the oldest established Golf Course in the highlands of Scotland!