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Mann Ki Baat June 2026 Visions of Milkha Singh- India in the 100 Meters, 200 Meters, 500 Meters, Modi talks to Indian Athletes, Gurindervir Singh and Animesh Kujur. Gurindervir Singh is from a family with father and grandfather in sports from the 1950's. He is India's fastest athlete in the 100 meters. Here he talks to Modi about his experiences competing in Indian athletics. He is part of the Indian Navy. One of the things he had to overcome is the sentiment that Indians could not compete with world class athletes like Roger Bannister in the sprint and fast running. He hope to dispel this sentiment. He is also a reminder of the achievements of Milkha Singh from his community in the Rome Olympics in 1960 where he came in 4th. Milkha Singh(known in India as the Flying Sikh) won the gold medal in 1958 and in 1962 at the Asian Games in the 200 meters and 400 meters races and the 4x400 Meters relay. He was part of the Indian Army. Kishane Thompson is one of the fastest sprinters under 10 seconds for 100 meters with most of the sprinters in top ten worldwide from the US or Jamaica. A whole new world is opening up in athletics in India with building of world class facilities, gyms, government support for athletes, and social recognition of the importance of athletics and sports. This extends to women's sports and the pesonal support to women's sports is well known throughout India from the prime minister. One of the aspects of running in Kenya, and Jamaica, is the hard scrabble conditions, which Indian athletes including Milkha Singh experienced, people from all parts of the country, without the necessary resources are also competing in sports in India in 2026. ...

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A useful guide to the Paris Olympics is given by FR24 that will help you find the games and locations that interest you. Simply click on Original Article to take you to FR24.

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Chancellor Scholz attends the Netherlands- Germany men's hockey final and says he is inspired by how our French friends conducted the Olympics. He says Germany will bid for 2040 Olympics. 

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Precautions taken by athletes at the Paris Olympics. The Beijing and Tokyo Olympics had Covid protocols and this is almost forgotten in Paris in 2024. Some teams are taking precautions like the Netherlands hockey team in Paris, not wanting to shake hands.

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It started out as a crazy idea but Paris Olympic organizers began to see the beauty of it. The Olympics on the River Seine itself. Organizers saw the 2018 Youth Olympics done on the streets of Buenos Aires showing that it could be done. And they were upto the challenge with a 1.4 billion e French government project to clean up the river and its rancid dirty water in time for the event in 2024, and to make it swimmable for the first time. Swimmers would dive into the Seine. Click on Original Article to see Les Carpenter's report in The Washington Post and see how the river Seine looks at different times of the day. It would be risky but after the pandemic it was worth trying to bring back the idea that Paris is back. Paris 2024 CEO Thobois, a badminton athlete himself, was upto it. After listening to all the experts, all the plans, the organizers looked at each other at the meeting and said that this is crazy -let's do it anyway.

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Vegetarian menu and hummus at the Paris 2024 Olympics to reduce the carbon footprint of the games. 

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Maroes Oldenburg of Netherlands stays calm in the final micro seconds taking a cue from the British rowers on the previous day as the Netherlands quad women rowing team win gold Paris Olympics 2024 by a fraction of a second- 0.18 seconds to be exact. Jonathan Liew of The Guardian shows the spirited Dutch effort in the final seconds. Maroes Oldenburg is recovering from a bicycling accident while traveling in Austria breaking her back, when she had to have a 6 hour surgery and was told she may not make it. It took 1 month for her to walk. “For anyone who needs some inspiration, break your neck and you can win Olympic gold,” says Maroes.  Glover who came in second has three children. Liew laments the lack of investment in childcare for woman athletes with small children, 124 years after women were admitted into the Olympics. Paris Olympics has a small investment in childcare, a nursery for the first time. Liew is right in saying throwing flowers from a distance at athletes is the easy part, giving working parents the tools to do well and childcare comes down to choices that we make. ...

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US beat Japan 1-0 with a goal from Trinity Rodman to make it to the semi finals of Women's soccer at the Paris Olympics 2024.

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The US loses to Morocco in the quarter finals of the 2024 Olympics 4-0. Morocco outplayed the US in every dimension with shots on target 8 for Morocco only one for the US. This shows how countries in the Arab world and in Africa are outperforming in the Paris Olympics. Egypt won over Spain one of the best European teams 2-1.

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Emma Hayes of the UK transforms the US women's soccer team by winning over Brazil 1-0 in the finals of Paris Olympics soccer 2024. It is only 3 months since she took over as coach.

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Paris Olympics organizers want this to be the smallest footprint on climate at 1.58 million metric tons of CO2. This is half that in 2012 London Olympics of 3.4 and 20% less than in Tokyo Olympics of 1.96. No rhetoric, actual facts is the goal even with 13 million spectators from many countries.

It was an opportunity for us to stage this Games in a different way, both for us to prove that the Games can be done differently, but also to leave a legacy,” says Georgina Grenon, Paris 2024’s director of environmental excellence." It is not that difficult to get 50% cut in emissions by using wood or low carbon cement. New construction is a big source of emissions. Paris organizers plan to use existing or temporary infrastructure, and also reuse what is built, and build some facilities in underserved deprived areas to use later for affordable housing. It is a remarkable and commendable effort.

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Efforts by City Hall and the French government to support public housing in Paris with new investment in the city for newly built public housing. This will create an attractive environment for low and middle income residents to stay in the city including small business owners, as the buildings are modern and add to the look of the city. This will be visible during the Olympics in 2024 in Paris. It is a clear goal of the city government of Paris to give people of different income levels the opportunities to live in attractive modern housing in the city. It remains a pioneer in this idea and its execution among European cities.

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A sensational last stroke victory for womens 4 person quad scull rowing team to get gold at Paris Olympics 2024. The team includes Lola Anderson shown in article alongside this and Georgina Brayshaw also alongside. Georgina was paralyzed on one side after a horse riding accident and still took up rowing just on her lack of fear of what she could or could not do, willing to try even on a bad day, bad year.

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Catherine Porter of the NYT gives this story of how the French are finally, finally cleaning up the Seine river in Paris. Under a Swimming plan workers are cleaning up the river so that long distance swimming for the 2024 Olympics happens inside the river itself. During rainstorms 40 portholes dotting the river's paved banks gush with sewage. Some homes along the river dump sewage right into the river, industrial waste also is dumped into the river. It was not always so, in the 1900 Olympics 7 swimming events happened in the river. Swimming was banned in the river in 1923 and today it is murky, and seen as hazardous for swimming. Studies from the 1990's onwards showed it has one of the highest heavy metals in the world in the stretch running through Paris.

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Yvette Cooper, UK Home Secretary, continues to pursue a policy of keeping open asylum hotels even as the UK public opinion on asylum seekers shifts, with large parts of the population not supporting it. Immigration is the top issue in Britain and keeping asylum seekers in hotels at government expense is highly unpopular. Giving Reform UK support that it did not have in 2024. A WSJ report shows the problems UK immigration policy is running into in 2025 under Labour.  Editorial opinion in The Times of London says Farage's ideas on stopping migrants should be heard, as both Conservatives and Labour have not got it right, with surging numbers of migrants as long as policies on benefits favor migrant flow. It is plain common sense. The irony is that for most of the British Empire since 1600 during colonization there were no such policies favoring immigrants much less illegal migrants, colonial peoples had no such rights in British colonies in China or India much less in Britain that are now being offered to migrants coming illegally under the European Convention of Human Rights. Asian people pulled themselves up by the bootstraps- Japan, Taiwan, China, and India, and never depended on such Conventions. Some ideas in The Times of London say the UK military should be given the task of protecting the waters around Britain and some troops stationed in France to prevent illegal boat crossings where they start, considering that such action was taken during the recent Olympics in France. ...

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Asylum hotel protests and illegal migrants in Britain filing for asylum at 111,000 cases in first 6 months costing $5.4 billion in first half 2025 alone. The Times of London says Starmer is cautious by nature, but strong action is needed going back to the source of the problem that illegal migrants do not belong in any European nation including Britain. The stark truth says Cowley in the Times of London is that having a battalion of British infantry on the coastline of France as it was during the Paris Olympics in France, is needed to keep the boats out of Britain with Britain moving out of the European Convention of Human Rights. That convention was not intended for this situation, just as the British system of justice was not intended for this situation for the people of other countries on other continents illegally migrating over oceans. Just as much as there is no Asian Convention of Human Rights for Europeans migrating over oceans to China, Japan or South Korea now industrialized nations with high standards of living and social protections for health care. ...

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A 16 year old girl, world junior climbing champion, who is one of the best climbers in France, with huge talent, slips unexpectedly on a path in the French Alps, falling 330 feet below. She was walking with family and friends on a path with a handrail in the Chartreuse mountains near her home in southeast France. It was such a banal incident. The French 2024 Paris Olympic Committee says with a lot of sadness that she had so many summits to climb. 

Climbers who went out with her say she had so much energy and joy and sent out so many positive waves. She did not consider the age and level of rivals but just went out with motivation and determination.

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After much effort and coming second to American Athing Mu, then in 3 way competition, with Mu and Kenya's Mary Moraa, every time coming in second, Keely Hodgkinson is patient and persevering. Till the Olympics in Paris where she comes out ahead of Moraa and takes the gold for Britain in the 800 metres. Andy Bull of The Guardian looks at British runner Keely Hodgkinson.

At the World Championships in Eugene, Oregon, Keely shadowed Mu and tried for first only to come short and missing by 8 hundredth of a second. In the Paris Olympics Mu was out with an injury and Keely had to race with Kenya's Mary Moraa who had come out ahead at the 2023 World Athletics in Budapest. In this race Keely runs alone to the finishing line.

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Milan will host the World Cities Culture Summit in 2020, and the Winter Olympics in 2026 shared with the Alpine town of Cortina. The international book fair of Turin is moving to Milan. The left of centre Mayor Giuseppe Sala has promoted the city to increase tourism by 50%. And foreign investment is increasing for new construction projects with $21 billion to be taken up in the next 15 years. Experts are asking if this is coming at a price as the rest of Italy has stagnated for 20 years, and the rural large city gap is increasing throughout Europe. The flow of professionals to cities such as Milan, Paris, Munich, Berlin, from other towns and cities is creating a huge shift that experts at the Centre of European Reform see as a problem because of the political turmoil, and rising inequality with ever widening gaps between smaller cities and towns and rural areas with the big cities. This is compounded by ageing and demographics such as seen in the eastern part of Germany, and parts of France. Experts call it The Big European Sort, where a sifting or sorting process is increasingly transforming the demographics of European countries and driving polarisation. This process is also happening in the U.S. Experts say the big cities benefitted from the change with the European single market and the European Union. Places where working class people live are not seeing and increase in wealth which is disproportionately going to professionals clustered in big cities. Deindustrialisation has turned places like Mezio only 20 miles from Milan into industrial ruins. Towns that once voted socialist are now voting far right in these hollowed out industrial places. In the U.S. and in Europe the process was exacerbated by the flow of cheap imports from Asia hollowing out factories in regions around big cities, and by the growth of services industry in big cities with globalization in finance, legal, and other professional services. Fro 1980 to 1995 Paris region lost about $5.5 billion in industrial output and gained $20 billion in services output that also aligns with globalization in areas such as finance, according to CER, Eurostat. The process had accelerated in 1995-2020. By telling this story about Milan and the Lombard region around it like Mezio, The Guardian is saying it is time to look at how everything works together rather than breaking apart- citing the Finnish architect Saarinen about how a chair fits into a room, a room into a house, and a house into its environment, an environment in a city. So the question is how can we build the future by seeing that the city fits into a region, and a region fits into a country. As a young professional described this on BBC television interview recently this is a difficult period with the ability to design the future seemingly snatched away by the times, but also an opportunity to rethink and take the actions today for a better tomorrow for all. This is part of the coverage on Cities in The Guardian looking at how cities can work, and how cities can become part of healthy regions, for organic growth. ...

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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. ...