No sooner has the aerostat come down on the Commonwealth Games and the knives are out for Organising Committee chairman Suresh Kalmadi, the wily old fox is on to a bigger game. Not letting any expensive astro-turf grow under his feet, he has said that his dream is to host the next Asian Games and a future Olympics. Now cynics among you may say that these events offer a much bigger share of the pie than the few thousand crores that went on the world's most expensive treadmills and toilet paper in the CWG. But we are missing the point here. We should enlarge dear old Kalmadi's scope from sports alone.
Clearly, he can hold up leaky stadium roofs and restore collapsing bridges in a manner of David Copperfield. He can grow flowers and shrubbery overnight and banish eyesores like beggars by sleight of hand. His contributions to our greater good are yet to come if we have the savvy to put him to use. We could, for a start, get him to tackle our problems of urban blight. Take for example, cleaning up the Yamuna. Give the job to him and he will not only clean it up in a trice but also sell the river to the Chinese thereby landing us a huge profit. Then comes the issue of urban slums. Using his expertise in the CWG, he could make them vanish to such far off places as Ulan Bator.
But his real forte would be in building. If he had been given the now controversial Adarsh housing society, it would have been up and running before anyone noticed that all was not well. Jairam Ramesh would have had quite a fight on his hands if Kalmadi were given charge of dams. While Jairam would be inspecting one, another dozen would have sprung up and let's see how he would have plugged that. So instead of thinking of ways to clip his wings, we must understand that such talent for speed and ability to take criticism on the chin is a rare one. A medal for the man, please.
{{/usCountry}}But his real forte would be in building. If he had been given the now controversial Adarsh housing society, it would have been up and running before anyone noticed that all was not well. Jairam Ramesh would have had quite a fight on his hands if Kalmadi were given charge of dams. While Jairam would be inspecting one, another dozen would have sprung up and let's see how he would have plugged that. So instead of thinking of ways to clip his wings, we must understand that such talent for speed and ability to take criticism on the chin is a rare one. A medal for the man, please.
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