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Vinay Menon put Wellness and Yoga on a new pathbreaking pattern- making it part of team soccer. He is shown here with coach Tuchel at Chelsea when it won the Champion's League final in 2021 over Manchester City. He was with the Belgium team as it played in the World Cup in Germany. He says the big problem in India for 1.4 billion people is filtration. Having talent filter through the club level is important. 100 clubs are needed in India, says Menon. He is confident that India will one day be in the World Cup. The Modi government has put sports at the top of its priorities for the nation of over  billion people with new facilities and financial support for athletes and players. Modi personally met with athletes before and after the Olympic games in Paris and followed the athletes as they competed in the games. Indians watch European soccer on television and only cricket competes with soccer in fan support. When India competes at the international level in soccer it will be with huge audiences tuned in. ...

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Mike Atherton on India vs England Test cricket series in June-July 2025. It is seen as a Test series for the ages, India vs England 2025. Looking back at the series Australia vs West Indies in 1960 when the Test ended in a tie when Gary Sobers and Richie Benaud were players for their teams, one finds this one drawing the same level of excitement and suspense. The whole series of 5 tests was filled with suspense, Pant's theatrics, Gill's brilliant batting matching world records set by Don Bradman and Jadeja's all rounder performance with bat and ball matching that of Gary Sobers. Bowling was not far behind with Bumrah, Siraj and Stokes.  The England team and the Indian team were evenly matched with Ben Stokes,Root and Woakes, Atkinson, English players giving it their all. Woakes was injured dislocating his shoulder in an effort to save a boundary, such was the fielding effort on the Oval grounds in the final test. Woakes turned up to bat in much pain, but did not face any balls thanks to Atkinson. Stokes bowled overs almost to exhaustion to miss the last Test.  ...

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The Vice Chief of the Indian Army explains in detail how the scheme that is rolled out for Agnipath is a pilot project and how the lessons learned will be incorporated over the next 5 years. He says the recruits leave with something like 24 lakhs rupees for a second innings at age 22, with the opportunity to get 13 lakhs in preferential basis loans in government assistance to start an enterprise. Others could choose to enhance their education and go on to get degrees under preferential educational setup. The idea is not to set them up for life but get them off to a good start as they are only about 22 years and with special technical skills acquired during their 4 years in the armed services. Technical skills acquired in the airforce could be even more advanced. Private industry in an India almost twice the size of the economy that exists today and the fastest growing economy in the world would easily absorb 30,000 of such highly trained disciplined people in the scheme who leave. The US GI Bill and other similar programs for the military have shown that this works and private industry is eager to take in these people on a preferential basis. These in fact have proven to be even more attractive opportunities using the example of the US experience than a government job. Lt. Gen. Raju says about the All India regiments replacing the homogenous units of the past. The Rastriya Rifles  and similar units in the Army have shown that the bonding happens for people from different parts of the country. He could have said that it is seen in the cricket teams where the bonding is between people from different regions and places. These units have performed very well says Raju in the LAC, in Kashmir, in border areas and in other situations. ...

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Without FW De Klerk's vision and leadership, and courage to go against the instincts of Afrikaaners in the National Party, could South Africa have ended up in civil war and become like some other African nations a failed state? This was a distinct possibility in the 1990's and a failed state today would be much worse than any of the difficulties that South Africa has faced so far. By 1992 with release of Nelson Mandela and 1994 with elections based on universal franchise, De Klerk had dismantled much of the system of Apartheid or race based rule of white Afrikaaners. Apartheid was a system of racial segregation based government imposed by a white Afrikaaner government in 1948 and which continued till 1994. Afrikaaners are descendants of Dutch immigrants to the Transvaal and other regions in British South Africa. They briefly fought a war with the British called the Boer War from 1899 to 1902. Today there are about 2.7 million Afrikaaners in South Africa, about 100,000 in Namibia, about 41,000 in Zambia. As best seen on the cricket grounds white and black Africans in South Africa and Namibia are part of a new mutiracial country. Much of this made possible by De Klerk's courage as a Transvaaler who made the right choices after assuming the leadership of the National party in 1989, coming from provincial roots in Transvaal.  ...

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The team of 5 engineers decided they would produce the first Vande Bharat train in 18 months- Project 18. The Indian Express talks to the team of original engineers who were on Project 18.  They are all part of Chennai Integral Coach Factory, setup with Swiss collaboration in 1955. By 2019 the first train was operational at speeds of 180 km per hour, semi-high speed and setting the transition to high speed trains developed entirely within India. Sudanshu Mani, General Manager of ICF, headed this effort and set the target of 18 months. He says China used to import all its trains and one day just decided to make its own- he asked himself the same question, why don't we make our own? Mani was in Berlin for 3 years on an earlier collaboration for train technology in the 1980's. By the 1990's this technology was 20 years old he says. That's how long it took to get anything done in those days, by the time it got started the technology would be obsolete. By 2018 just 2 years before retirement Sudanshu set up the Project 18 team convinced that this was the only way to get it done- to beat the odds. Devi Prasad Dash heads electrical engineering. Srinivas heads mechanical engineering. Pradhan is Chief Design Engineer. They did everything from scratch. There are 5000 others who worked on the project. Dash says it was like T20 cricket, just that they decided to do it in 18 overs. Ever wonder why the train is all white and with blue stripe? Subranshu who was chief mechanical engineer at the time says they tried other colors. Manish Pradhan says they decided on white after one thought that Indian trains are never white because we had that belief that anything white would get dirty faster. That is when we decided to make it all white and it will not look dirty, he says. Sudanshu Mani says he would close his eyes and he would see always the old Indian trains that one would see from the 1960's from Ahmedabad to Rameswaram, and onto Colombo after the ferry. At that time Colombo had Canadian coaches and locomotives under a Canadian aid plan from Talaimannar to Colombo which were like American trains, looked miles into the future.The same thing must have happened to Chinese engineers because Chinese premier Chou-en-lai visited the ICF in Chennai in the 1950's and wrote that Chinese engineers could learn about the new Swiss technologies from ICF Chennai. That is when the Swiss were building their own trains with European technology of that time. China and India, and Japan had no idea about the high speed trains that were in the future. This is how technology advances. This is how people build better lives and how the aspirations and hopes of younger generations become a reality. Somewhere in the dim light of the past there is a Chinese engineer with the undaunted courage, concentration and determination to "Just Do It," and before that a Japanese engineer, and before that a Swiss engineer designing a train for the Swiss Alps, a Canadian or American engineer designing newer trains for the Prairies all the way to British Columbia and California. All dreaming Big and executing Well, with the resources of each country there to aid them each step of the way. ...