Jun 1, 2010
A preview of the World Cup M Magazine (India), June issue If in the course of a visit to planet earth, an intelligent being from another world attended the great sporting spectacles on offer here, he she or it, without the aid of a translator or explainer, would quickly grasp the essentials of football (even… Read more
May 8, 2010
Frontline (India) 8 May 2010 An abbreviated version of this article has been published on the Guardian’s Comment is free website. In the flush of its success, the IPL was held up as the face of the new, thrusting, ambitious India and its swelling status. “It is a global representation of India,” Lalit Modi argued,… Read more
Jan 12, 2010
The Guardian, Comment is free 12 January 2010 Visiting friends in Delhi, I found the local media celebrating India’s performance at Copenhagen, from which it had emerged unburdened by the slightest commitment to reducing carbon emissions. This “climate nationalism” seemed particularly grotesque given that north India’s river systems are threatened by receding Himalayan glaciers and… Read more
Aug 1, 2009
CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING Red Pepper, August-September 2009 Cricket emerges as the world’s first, modern organised team sport in the late 18th century, and is indelibly marked by that early origin. Its fate was intertwined with the political and economic revolutions of the era, and was shaped from the outset by a paradoxical mixture of… Read more
Apr 19, 2008
Outlook (India), 19 April The International Olympic Committee is hoist on its own petard. On the one hand, it insists that politics and sport must be kept separate. On the other, it relies entirely on cooperation with governments to stage its quadrennial show. So keeping politics out of sport ends up meaning keeping whatever is… Read more
Apr 4, 2008
Review: What Sport Tells Us About Life: Bradman’s Average, Zidane’s Kiss and other sporting lessons by Ed Smith. The Independent, 4 April Contrary to the title, this is really a book about what life tells us about sport, in particular, what we can learn about elite sport by examples and analyses drawn from other disciplines…. Read more
Jan 10, 2008
The Guardian, Comment is free 10 January In the angry contentions gripping world cricket following the Sydney Test between India and Australia, a number of disparate issues have become intertwined. To find a way through the thicket of questions raised by the imbroglio, it’s necessary to disentangle them. It’s also necessary to get beyond the… Read more
