First individual Olympic gold for India

The numbers first. Since the first modern Olympics in 1900, India has won 8 golds and a silver for team game hockey, one individual gold in shooting (2008), two individual silvers in sprint, and 4 individual bronzes. A grand total of seven individual medals out of 16. Of these, two were won by a Britisher, Norman Pritchard, then representing India. That leaves five medals won by Indian Indians in 108 years.
Perhaps this is progress. Just as the poor in India are becoming poorer at a slower rate, just as cities are getting polluted at a lesser rate than before, the birth rate is also coming down ever so slowly, a marginal decrease in the number of primary school dropouts.
The list of Indian achievements is unending. If it is a drop in the ocean, it's all about how each drop makes an ocean.
There's no stopping the Indian media today. Newspaper reporters and TV teams and their OB vans have been staking out at the residences of Abhinav Bindra, the new Indian wunderkind. Anyone, human or pet, who even remotely knows him, would have been interviewed before the day ends. Political parties and local resident associations must have by now hired the best musical bands, fetched the best of the dry colours left over from last Holi, and budding mimics of plyaback singers who are dime a dozen in every street, to begin celebrating the Indian achievement (the timing of the celebration strangely coinciding with the arrival of the electronic media). Astrologers will have a field day in news television studios.
The media will not rest until they record a phone conversation between Bindra and his mother and father, until the family has visited a place of worship and thanked the God, the Country and India's great past, in that order.
The religious problem in Jammu over a piece of religious land takes backstage today. The courts may or may not pronounce judgments. There will be no one to hear complaints about lack of water in municipal taps or the short-circuitting of an electric transformer. The government ministers will be with their secretaries, checking their appointments with tv news stations at prime time. The country will also conveniently ignore the country's inglorious defeat in the third cricket test against Sri Lanka.

All, thanks to Abhinav Bindra. He made India forget its ills, weaknesses, corruption, atrocities, abuses, poverty, illiteracy and what not. He made the rich and the poor alike sing his country's praise. By night, India would have appropriated Bindra's achievement as its own, a reflection of its 5,000-year past, a precursor to the future when India will emerge a power to reckon with.
Will we Indians ever learn to be honest to ourselves for once by not taking the credit for someone else's success? If Bindra won the gold in Beijing today, it was because he was successful in bucking the system.
There are thousands of Bindras out there in India who are waiting to similarly overcome the system for personal success. How many will eventually succeed?