It happens frequently in PG Wodehouse stories. A protagonist, not necessarily richly endowed with the grey cells so central to getting on in life, finds himself stymied somewhere along the way and it comes home to him that God, inscrutable in his wisdom, has erected a hurdle he cannot really surmount. Narinder Batra, of hockey, and Praful Patel, until recently Indian football’s administrative supremo, have been given their marching orders legally, neither having presumably been deemed central to India’s requirements in a year when we must take an Asian Games and a Commonwealth Games in our stride. Even if any of them felt hard done by, each showed prudence in being peaceably disposed of. Patel, whose exit was the earlier one, had been in occupation of a chair he should have left a long while ago, his term has been over. Batra was guilty of self-perpetuating machinations in Hockey India. When shown the way out, he said that he would not poke his nose ~ fighting elections, for instance – into the Indian Olympic Association, which he led, any longer. He roared all right that he still called the shots in the IOA, but it sounded like the pathetic ranting of a man licked to a splinter. 

This was where he did not seem reminiscent of Wodehouse characters in distress: the fictional figures were innocence personified but the real-life heavyweights might not have been anyone’s idea of a purveyor of light and sweetness in life. The Duke of Dunstable, for example, could have taken their correspondence course, truth to tell. If anyone links India’s latest Olympic medals with Batra’s leadership of the IOA, they could also be inclined to consider themselves frying pans. 

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Patel should long ago have been asked why India, playing a really strong team of rivals in the international game, looked like men afflicted with lumbago, or arthritis, or both. While, for years, the team lurched from one disaster to another and players and coaches were shown the red card, the controlling set-up never changed. All the tempting perquisites of the job ~ foreign trips, handsome daily allowances, the finest hotels with all easily imaginable luxuries of life ~ were for the clever ones in lounge suits as the footballers, good or bad, struggled in the field and Indians looked away in shame. Part of the story, of course, was that the Centre was all along giving football a lot of money, wasted or misused. 

All of this could simultaneously combine to fuel a hope in the bosom of the archetypal sport-lover that the righteous indignation that has taken matters to the court of law is completely unrelated to the elections of the IOA, which were to have taken place last year but did not because of, well, legal complications. Batra being laid low is okay, but the narrative continues, without Jeeves making his presence felt. That alone would ensure a hearty laugh.