Okay, I`ll offer something in support of the organizers. The media has only and only been focusing on what the negatives have been. However, they`ve totally ignored the fact that there are a lot of positives to have come out of this as well. The stadia, for example all look World Class and dare I say, of Olympic standards. That will only help provide our athletes with world class facilities after the event is over, in the lead up to the 2012 Olympics.
The new airport at Delhi is one of the best in the World and there has been an initiative to build newer metro railway lines, all as a part of the CWG development. Coming to the Games village itself, the dining area and the International Zone have received accolades from most contingents and many claim to have not seen anything like this before.
The rooms could have been handled better but even in that aspect most people seem happy now. One must not forget that unlike Manchester 2002 or Malaysia 1998 where athletes stayed in university hostel rooms, these are all permanent facilities. The athletes are being provided with 4-room-kitchen lodging. The maintenance could have been better but they are fixing it in time. It should all have been done a couple of months in advance and that is where the organizers should take the blame. But for heaven`s sake, at least give them a chance.
Noone has been willing to give us a chance to prove that we can host a good Games and they have flooded newspaper pages with negative propaganda. The Indian media has been at its cynical best without realizing its their own country hosting the event and that they need all the support and not every small negative being blown out of proportion. Do you think there would have been so much fuss made of things like a tile coming out had it been in China? Its just that we have a free media that such hue and cry has been made of this.
And it has been learnt that the sting operation on the CWG security, done by Channel 7 is fake. The guy who claims to have breached the security actually goes nowhere near the actual security of the venue and just past the barricading done by the police to direct traffic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6xk-Tm_1y4
Kudos to ABC for breaking down all the false claims by the Channel 7 journalist. And thankfully from the Indian point of view, its an Aussie channel which proves the claims to be dodgy and not some Indian channel.
aditya123 added 17 Minutes and 44 Seconds later...
Praising the goods is fine, but there is a difference between that and propaganda. That 10 rooms example was pure unadulterated bullshit. I had to point that out
Mark, much of what we see is what the media shows us. The Indian media is news-hungry and TRP hungry. They don`t care about showing stuff even if it means demeaning their own country and their own event. You`ll never see that happen in China, for instance. So you`ll never know if there were any teething troubles during the Olympics there because their media would never show anything like that. Do you think you`d be talking about all this had the media not come out with these stories and the first thing you associated with the CWG 2010 was the opening ceremony or if you`d only been shown the positive images of the swanky new Airport, the state of the art stadia and things like that. I`m sure that the organizers would not have thrown the athlete`s village rooms open to the arriving contingents without cleaning it up even if the media did not bring it to our notice. Also, do not forget that although the delays are inexcusable, Delhi had the worst floods in more than 3 decades with the rains continuing till upto the middle of September. Something like that would have affected the preparations to a mega sporting event, be it any country in the world. Beijing 2008 was lucky in that sense.
In a certain way, that is the strength of India as well. Noone is curbed of their freedom, even if it means doing negative propaganda against their own government.
aditya123 added 2 Minutes and 57 Seconds later...
Actually, most of the complaints have been centralized across 1-2 isolated incidents.
That's not to say that it's okay and that definitely doesn't excuse the organizers and politicians from being so tactless in addressing the media.
But Sohum, it does not help when the Indian media are just TRP-hungry and have no national pride themselves. They`d show the pictures of a dirty toilet a million times and establish that image in people`s minds to make them believe everything about the Games is bad.
aditya123 added 5 Minutes and 8 Seconds later...
I`m not doing blind propaganda for my country but just pointing out that we only see what the media wants us to see. We only saw the good things about Beijing 2008 because the media showed us only those images and the Chinese govt would never allow their media to say anything remotely negative about their event. Who is to say that there nothing went wrong in the lead up to the Beijing games?