Oops! Where’s the 2010 hockey World Cup?

VIJAY LOKAPALLY

India won the 2010 FIH World Cup. At least the Union Sports Ministry would like us to believe this ‘in camera’ triumph.

In a shocking piece of information, the official brochure of the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, released on the occasion of the National Sports and Adventure awards function on Monday, records a series of erroneous entries but nothing to beat this glorious ‘feat’.

INDIA WAS EIGHTH

India’s World Cup achievement is highlighted in the citation for hockey captain Rajpal Singh, who, according to the brochure, won four medals in various international tournaments, capping his brilliant run with the 2010 World Cup victory. India, in fact, had finished a poor eighth in the12-nation competition held at the Major Dhyan Chand National Stadium here.

Rajpal was delighted with the Arjuna Award, never mind the World Cup gold. India’s only World Cup win had come in 1975 at Kuala Lumpur.

The introduction to every citation is a monotonous “is one of the most outstanding… of the country.” Obviously, the concerned department seems to have learnt little from the bloomers it committed last year too.

ZAHEER ‘ROBBED’

Zaheer Khan, conferred the Arjuna Award, could not attend the function since he was recovering from an ankle surgery in London. A perusal of his citation would have left him ‘robbed’ of some well-earned wickets in international cricket.

The citation proclaims Zaheer took 137 wickets in 33 Tests and 96 wickets in 71 One-Day Internationals. At the end of the Lord’s Test in the recently-concluded series in England, Zaheer’s tally stood at 273 wickets from 79 matches. In ODIs, he has an identical number of wickets from 191 matches.

That archer Rahul Banerjee finds Jayanta Talukdar’s photo adorning his citation page is sad enough, not to mention the embarrassingly high number of spelling mistakes.

The most glaring coming in the Hindi section — Arjuna has been all through spelt Ajurn.

Industrialist N. Ramachandran has been ‘hailed’ as the founder of India Cements, much to the surprise of his family members. He was presented the ‘Rashtriya Protsahan Puraskar’ for professionally running a squash academy in Chennai.

‘UNINTERRUPTED STINT’

Bombay University can rejoice for winning the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad trophy for the best university.

It has been credited with winning the award from 1998-99 till date. It has won the award only twice and the last time was in 1959-60.

In reality, Guru Nanak Dev University, Punjab University and Delhi University had shared the honour during the ‘uninterrupted stint’ of Bombay University.