Despite my comprehensive travels and research around the
country following basketball, I don’t remember ever meeting Ritu Kumari Rana. I
don’t know, I may have come across
her at a national tournament in Mumbai or Vashi or Nagpur or somewhere, but really,
all I know of her is what Google tells me, and Google doesn’t tell me that much.
Ritu, a 30-year-old national-level basketball player in
India, committed suicide on Monday morning when she leapt in front of a train
track between Malad and Kandivli. She hailed from Himachal Pradesh and was
working as a sports teacher at the Ecole Mondiale World School in Mumbai for
the past six months. She has worked in several schools as a coach, and had
spent about six years in Mumbai. Sources say that, in the past, she had
represented both Himachal Pradesh and Chandigarh in Basketball and Cricket.
The death of a basketball player in the country of course
concerns all loosely attached to basketball in the country, but Ritu’s case, it
turns out, is special. A year ago, Ritu was selected amongst 14 Indian
Basketball Coaches to travel to the USA as part of a Sports Visitor exchange programme, organized by the US Department of State and the NBA. The 14 coaches
spent 10 days in the USA, where they trained with American basketball coaches in
Washington DC and even travelled to Orlando for the NBA All Star Weekend.
The cynic could argue that the event was more diplomacy than
sport, where the choice of Indian coaches attending may not have been made by
merit. I don’t know; I wasn’t there. But still, Ritu was chosen, so Ritu must
have been good enough to belong. She must have been good enough to catch the
eye of the NBA who sent her there and of the coaches who worked with her in the
US. She must have been good enough if she was coaching in a reputed school in
Mumbai. She must have been good enough if she played at the national level.
So why does a talented life choose to end itself so early,
so tragically?
In an article on the Afternoon Despatch & Courier,
Ritu’s sports mentor Sayed Nisar Ali was quoted clarifying the young women’s suicide note,
mentioning that she felt the pressure by her family for a better job and
pressure by herself to represent the Indian basketball team.
“She kept looking for a good job and despite all
her credentials and the scholarship from the NBA, could not manage to
get one,” Ali said, “She used to feel very dejected about it. Ritu failed to
understand that if the government in the US could recognize her for her talent
why was the Indian government so ignorant about her skills.”
There is little we know so far of her story beyond this.
Now, here’s the thing: there is no prerogative for any employer or team in
India to offer every available player a job or a spot in the squad. Some people
make it, some people don’t. It’s the ugly truth of the competitive rat-race for
survival in this world. She did odd coaching jobs but perhaps it didn’t earn
her enough.
But Ritu’s death highlights – in the cruelest possible way –
the worst-case scenario of India’s sporting fraternity gone wrong. She is not
the only one who suffered from the pressure to make it in Indian sports. I have
met athletes of different fields – from tennis to archery to of course,
basketball – who are in Ritu’s shoes. Many of these athletes are very skilled.
Many of them should be professionals in the sport, earning a respectable,
constant salary for their hard work. And perhaps, almost equally as importantly,
should be earning the respect of the community for choosing sport as a career.
But we Indians regard sports – along with other professions
that don’t involve MBAs, Doctorates, Engineering Degrees or political
aspirations – as a lesser choice. Our parents tell us that sports should be
kept as a hobby and we should think of something ‘serious’ as a profession. The
job market reminds us that there is a higher demand, respect, and salary for
those who stashed away the basketball and replaced it with a textbook. Many
still continue down that line though, because sports are often the one true
love that they can’t forget or their one and only option out of dire straits.
After all, athletes in India, if they’re good or ‘connected’ enough, can secure
sarkari jobs and a constant (if poor)
government salary.
I don’t know anything more about her, so all I can offer is
conjecture. Maybe Ritu wasn’t good enough to play for a state any more. Maybe
she wasn’t good enough to be recruited by any one of India’s few women’s basketball
clubs. Maybe she couldn’t hold another sarkari
job because basketball is she could do, or all she wanted to do. She was a
30-year-old single woman struggling to find work in Mumbai and all she had was basketball.
She was like tens of thousands of other basketball, volleyball, athletics, archery,
tennis, football, or hockey players around the country whose skill-set isn’t
respected enough for them to make a guaranteed living out of it.
We need to change our mind-set. We need to save other Ritus
around the country. It starts with respect for athletes, respect that they deserve
for their art and for their talents. They shouldn’t have to suffer for the respect
of their parents or the society for what they do. We need to especially change
that mentality towards women athletes, who have a tougher time breaking into
the sporting arena. The next step would be for our federations and institutions
to provide a platform where these athletes have the opportunity to – somehow or
the other – stay involved with the sport. (Especially if they showed great
potential and were chosen for a programme like the US Department of State
Sports Exchange!)
Ritu’s suicide note, found at her flat in Malwani, finished
with the lines, “I request my family to forgive me. I could not do anything for
them.” There are no good ways to die, but when a basketball player commits
suicide because they couldn’t do more for their family – economically, or as
Ali suggested, in living up to their expectations – it is an even bleaker
situation that many other athletes in the nation can relate to. On the
Afternoon Despatch & Courier feature, author Priyal Dave says to us that
India let Ritu down. We can’t let that happen to any others like her.
I didn’t know Ritu. But I know the stories of those like
her, those in the sometimes dark and depressing line of sports in India. And we
need to save those Indian sportsmen and sportswomen who need their sport to
survive, or to fulfil their dreams. She may have checked out of the game, but
for those who are still on court, we have to now change the system so they can keep
playing at the highest level.
