Amid the resounding cheers greeting India's first individual Olympic gold medal, expatriates are hoping the win will usher in a more diverse future for sports in a country where cricket tends to overshadow all else.
Despite having a population of 1.1 billion people and competing in the Games since 1928, until Abhinav Bindra, 25, hit the target in the men's 10m air rifle Monday, India had yet to bag such a gold.
"There can't be better news for Indians," said Viren Varma, media manager of Golf in Dubai, promoter and organiser of events such as the Dubai Desert Classic and the Dubai Ladies Masters.
"India always had the potential but never really made an impact at the Olympics. There was always talk about how a country with over a billion people could not get a single medal at the Olympics. Hopefully this year there would be no such discussions."
India's only other Olympic medals in men's individual sports were a bronze for freestyle wrestler Kha-Shaba Jadav in 1952 and a bronze for tennis player Leander Paes in 1996.
Karnam Malleswari, a weightlifter, became India's first female Olympic medallist, with bronze in the 69kg category in 2000, and the shooter Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore won silver in the double trap event four years ago in Athens.
India has won gold at the Olympics before, but only in group sports, such as field hockey. Bindra's victory was particularly significant following the failure of the Indian men's hockey team to qualify for the Games for the first time. They have won the Olympic hockey tournament eight times and taken three other medals in the sport, though none since 1980.
Manohar Singh Gill, the Indian sports minister, said Bindra's performance would lift the success-starved country.
"This is going to give a huge incentive in going up further and becoming a dominant [sporting] power," he told Indian television. "We've won hockey golds in the past but the individual gold is going to give a huge fillip to all our sports. The boys and girls will run that much faster and jump that much longer."
Others agree this is a critical time in defining India's relationship with sports. With a roaring economy and the privatisation of the Indian cricket team into the Indian Premier League - which recently completed its first season and proved highly profitable for the team's owners - there remains hope that the corporate sector will seek to invest and sponsor by diversifying into other sports sectors.
"This gold medal is long overdue and rightly deserved," said Ganesh Sundara Raju, an Indian national tennis player and a coach for young players in Dubai.
"As a sports player myself, I know that infrastructure and good coaches have always been a problem for India. We have plenty of talent but it really needs to be nurtured. Sports marketing is long due in India and the success of the India Premier League cricket is a clear indicator."
Traditionally, Indians have been cautious when it comes to embracing "new" careers; whereas once it was considered prestigious to pursue careers only in professional fields such as medicine, engineering, and law, it is now not uncommon for the middle class to consider jobs in sectors such as information technology or entertainment.
"In India the focus has never been on sports," said Bharat Chachara, manager of the India Club, Dubai. "The mindset has always been that one can't make a career out of sports unless playing cricket or hockey.
"However, with the booming economy and a lot of sponsorship coming in for sports, things are soon changing."
Sports, especially some individual games such as tennis, have grown in credibility recently. For example, Sania Mirza, a young tennis professional, is considered a role model and, in turn, has earned lucrative endorsement deals.
Now India's new golden Olympian, who hails from Chandigarh, is likely to follow in her footsteps.
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How Tesla’s price correction has hit fund managers
Investing in disruptive technology can be a bumpy ride, as investors in Tesla were reminded on Friday, when its stock dropped 7.5 per cent in early trading to $575.
It recovered slightly but still ended the week 15 per cent lower and is down a third from its all-time high of $883 on January 26. The electric car maker’s market cap fell from $834 billion to about $567bn in that time, a drop of an astonishing $267bn, and a blow for those who bought Tesla stock late.
The collapse also hit fund managers that have gone big on Tesla, notably the UK-based Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust and Cathie Wood’s ARK Innovation ETF.
Tesla is the top holding in both funds, making up a hefty 10 per cent of total assets under management. Both funds have fallen by a quarter in the past month.
Matt Weller, global head of market research at GAIN Capital, recently warned that Tesla founder Elon Musk had “flown a bit too close to the sun”, after getting carried away by investing $1.5bn of the company’s money in Bitcoin.
He also predicted Tesla’s sales could struggle as traditional auto manufacturers ramp up electric car production, destroying its first mover advantage.
AJ Bell’s Russ Mould warns that many investors buy tech stocks when earnings forecasts are rising, almost regardless of valuation. “When it works, it really works. But when it goes wrong, elevated valuations leave little or no downside protection.”
A Tesla correction was probably baked in after last year’s astonishing share price surge, and many investors will see this as an opportunity to load up at a reduced price.
Dramatic swings are to be expected when investing in disruptive technology, as Ms Wood at ARK makes clear.
Every week, she sends subscribers a commentary listing “stocks in our strategies that have appreciated or dropped more than 15 per cent in a day” during the week.
Her latest commentary, issued on Friday, showed seven stocks displaying extreme volatility, led by ExOne, a leader in binder jetting 3D printing technology. It jumped 24 per cent, boosted by news that fellow 3D printing specialist Stratasys had beaten fourth-quarter revenues and earnings expectations, seen as good news for the sector.
By contrast, computational drug and material discovery company Schrödinger fell 27 per cent after quarterly and full-year results showed its core software sales and drug development pipeline slowing.
Despite that setback, Ms Wood remains positive, arguing that its “medicinal chemistry platform offers a powerful and unique view into chemical space”.
In her weekly video view, she remains bullish, stating that: “We are on the right side of change, and disruptive innovation is going to deliver exponential growth trajectories for many of our companies, in fact, most of them.”
Ms Wood remains committed to Tesla as she expects global electric car sales to compound at an average annual rate of 82 per cent for the next five years.
She said these are so “enormous that some people find them unbelievable”, and argues that this scepticism, especially among institutional investors, “festers” and creates a great opportunity for ARK.
Only you can decide whether you are a believer or a festering sceptic. If it’s the former, then buckle up.
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First Person
Richard Flanagan
Chatto & Windus
The specs: 2018 Range Rover Velar R-Dynamic HSE
Price, base / as tested: Dh263,235 / Dh420,000
Engine: 3.0-litre supercharged V6
Power 375hp @ 6,500rpm
Torque: 450Nm @ 3,500rpm
Transmission: Eight-speed automatic
Fuel consumption, combined: 9.4L / 100kms
The Africa Institute 101
Housed on the same site as the original Africa Hall, which first hosted an Arab-African Symposium in 1976, the newly renovated building will be home to a think tank and postgraduate studies hub (it will offer master’s and PhD programmes). The centre will focus on both the historical and contemporary links between Africa and the Gulf, and will serve as a meeting place for conferences, symposia, lectures, film screenings, plays, musical performances and more. In fact, today it is hosting a symposium – 5-plus-1: Rethinking Abstraction that will look at the six decades of Frank Bowling’s career, as well as those of his contemporaries that invested social, cultural and personal meaning into abstraction.
How to wear a kandura
Dos
- Wear the right fabric for the right season and occasion
- Always ask for the dress code if you don’t know
- Wear a white kandura, white ghutra / shemagh (headwear) and black shoes for work
- Wear 100 per cent cotton under the kandura as most fabrics are polyester
Don’ts
- Wear hamdania for work, always wear a ghutra and agal
- Buy a kandura only based on how it feels; ask questions about the fabric and understand what you are buying
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Three ways to limit your social media use
Clinical psychologist, Dr Saliha Afridi at The Lighthouse Arabia suggests three easy things you can do every day to cut back on the time you spend online.
1. Put the social media app in a folder on the second or third screen of your phone so it has to remain a conscious decision to open, rather than something your fingers gravitate towards without consideration.
2. Schedule a time to use social media instead of consistently throughout the day. I recommend setting aside certain times of the day or week when you upload pictures or share information.
3. Take a mental snapshot rather than a photo on your phone. Instead of sharing it with your social world, try to absorb the moment, connect with your feeling, experience the moment with all five of your senses. You will have a memory of that moment more vividly and for far longer than if you take a picture of it.
VEZEETA PROFILE
Date started: 2012
Founder: Amir Barsoum
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: HealthTech / MedTech
Size: 300 employees
Funding: $22.6 million (as of September 2018)
Investors: Technology Development Fund, Silicon Badia, Beco Capital, Vostok New Ventures, Endeavour Catalyst, Crescent Enterprises’ CE-Ventures, Saudi Technology Ventures and IFC
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AT4 Ultimate, as tested
Engine: 6.2-litre V8
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Price: From Dh330,800 (Elevation: Dh236,400; AT4: Dh286,800; Denali: Dh345,800)
On sale: Now
