The Olympian Spirit?

The countdown to the Olympics has begun. Every day, we are assailed with news items and video clips of how grand everything is going to be, how hard China has worked to make this a truly spectacular spectacle, how magnificent all the new buildings are, etc, etc. And the Indian media is particularly enamoured of the magnificence of everything, the Chinese ‘will’ that has stopped cars and bulldozers to clean the Beijing air, how grand their stadia are…

All of which might be so, but who is looking behind the facade? Who is digging deep enough for the truth? Who is trying to see the face beneath the mask of make believe, make up? Anyone who has been to China as a tourist, businessperson, member of the media, or as part of a delegation, will vouch for the fact that it is difficult to veer away from set itineraries — that are designed and controlled by local authorities. A gentleman visiting Tibet was so sick of the official line of how everything is rosy and lovely that he feigned sickness, shook off his Chinese ‘host’, and sneaked out of the back door of the hotel to do some sightseeing on his own. And this was long before the March protests, or the paranoia brought on by the Olympics.

In their long history, the Olympics have not just stood for sport, nor an excuse for entertainment, nor as a platform for showing off material wealth and prosperity. They have symbolised the urge of the human spirit towards excellence, towards striving, towards all that is higher, faster, stronger.

China has ignored all these humanistic goals and reduced the games to a mere spectacle. Sure, a grand one, but an empty, soulless one that is all glitter and no soul. That is pretty for sure, but well, that’s all there is. Why do I say this? Because of the cruel oppression that has been intensified in the wake of the Olympics. Because of the fact that the wealth that has helped create this spectacle comes from a highly polluting, unsustainable model of development borrowed from Western market capitalism.

For an eyewitness account of the repression in Tibet, read this Huffington Post article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-novick/guilty-of-being-tibetan-s_b_115302.html

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