India’s hockey players have achieved the impossible off-field with their performance in the Tokyo Olympics. They have managed to make a lot of disparate and some sparring entities happy at the same time. The feminists are happy and the chauvinists are happy. The real coaches --- Graham Reid and Sjoerd Marijne --- are happy and reel coach, Kabir Khan, is also happy. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is happy; after all he motivated them. Aditya Chak De Chopra must be happy for the Olympian replug of a nearly 15-year-old film. Akshay Kumar is also happy; he tweeted his congratulations to the men’s team for “rewriting history”. And it is perhaps safe to assume that after he is done filming Prithviraj Chauhan, Rakhsha Bandhan and Ram Setu, Akki will start rewriting Love in Tokyo into Bronze in Tokyo.

Say cheese

Let’s see who else is happy? The cribbers are happy. It would all have been too hearty and saccharine and bhaichara but then Farhan Akhtar congratulated the women’s team for the medal haul and gave them (cribbers) something to beat someone up about. Jharkhand is happy. First, chief minister Hemant Soren had a smart TV installed at defender Salima Tete’s parents’ home in Simdega district so they could watch their daughter play. And after the win, they have one more reason to cheer — Soren has promised every team member Rs 50 lakh.

As you reap…

Haryana is happy, in Punjab Captain has reason to smile, MP is happy, Manipur is happy, and even the presently troubled Mizoram is happy. Cash awards after the Games, backslapping after the Games, photo sessions and attention after the Games --- if one can straightaway reap an Olympian harvest without dwelling on the sowing, who will not be happy. Odisha and Naveen Patnaik, of course, have good reason to be euphoric — the state sponsored the women’s and men’s teams after Sahara backed out in 2018. What about the spirit of Dhyan Chand did you ask? Is The Wizard smiling down from the heavens at one of the most prestigious sporting awards of the country being renamed after him? Maybe, maybe not. Major Chand, who won gold in three Olympic Games wrote in his autobiography, “You are doubtless aware that I am a common man, and then a soldier. It has been my training from my very childhood to avoid limelight and publicity. I have chosen a profession where I have been taught to be a soldier, and nothing beyond that.”