The ‘Summer Olympics Special’ edition of Time had rightly divided its 71-page section on the Olympics in London into three sections : mind, body and spirit! Sportspersons these days become more and more conscious that sports is not only related to the body, as it had been always thought to be. The mind plays a great role as much as the spirit in any sports.
What had been amazing in every Olympic event is the way how sportspersons try to break their earlier records, and thereby setting greater heights of perfection in their respective fields. The one buzz word in every game is speed. Everything is looked at in comparison to the earlier Olympics. It is said that in races during Olympics, the winner is declared on the basis of the few nano-seconds he or she had defeated his or her next competitor.
Victory is the key word that propels the sports-persons to take the rigorous training and practice as a sadhana, almost as a spiritual practice. Going through the personal lives of some of the gold medal winners in the Olympics, we come to know that some of them had been practicing for 12 to 16 hours a day. This is no mean achievement for people who have also their personal lives to live. Once the sports-persons have fixed their eyes on the Olympic gold medal, everything else becomes secondary, including their relationships, career, and love-life; nothing could take them away from their goal.
Single-minded devotion is also one of the greatest virtues that has been highly extolled in the Indian sacred scriptures. Ekagrachitta is the virtue that is highly recommended in the Bhagavad Gita. Without this virtue no one can really attain the goal one sets for himself/herself. Perhaps this value could be noticed quite conspicuously in all gold medalists at the Olympics.
It was again this single-mindedness which brought freedom to the nation, and freed us from the slavery of colonisers. We had a whole band of men and women who gave up their personal lives in order to free the nation, to claim self-rule, and it is their sweat and blood which brought us freedom, and today India is a free nation, and can decide for herself, without external or internal coercion, thanks to their toil.
What is saddening today is that most of the leaders who determine the fate of the nation do not have the fire which was so very obvious in the freedom-fighters; instead of taking the nation forward, these rulers only take the country backwards, filling only their pockets at the expense of the millions who still do not have two square meals a day.
There are people in the country who would like to take the country forward on par with the developed countries; they would not like to have the nation’s resources spent on arms and ammunition, on building information techno-logies, with more number of satellites built indigenously; there are people who want the internet connectivity given to all villages. But do we understand that still quite many villages of the country do not even have basic electricity!
Each one of us has responsibilities towards the nation building; we can build it only by sticking to the ideals our foreparents have set before our eyes. It is only then that we would be able to make our nation proud!